Cicada Spring

by Christian Galacar

  “Yes, Harry, I do. That’s why I’m trying to figure out how we should handle this. You need a clear head right now,” Allison said, and came into the living room.

  “We?” Harry scoffed and ran a hand through his hair.

  “Yes, we. Don’t for a minute think that you’d be where you are today without my help. It isn’t you alone out there. It isn’t Harry Bennett versus the world, whether you think it is or not. Where’d you get the money for your campaign? Where’d you get the money to start the trucking company? You’d still be shoveling gravel if I hadn’t helped you.”

  “Don’t speak to me like that.” He pointed a rigid finger at her but caught himself, lowering his hand and his temper. For a moment, he felt the darkness tunneling in, but he beat it back. This isn’t the time to lose it, Harry.

  Harry cringed at what she’d just said. The money! The goddamned money! She was throwing that in his face. He’d always suspected that she held that debt over him, but she’d never said it… not until now. There was truth in it, though. He had needed her money in the beginning, but now he was making plenty of his own. Financially, he didn’t have use for her any longer, but she still had value to him, especially now. Her social influence was undeniable. Her life seemed to be one giant game of telephone, and when she whispered into the ear of Heartsridge, the message was always received clearly and quickly. Allison would be the one to keep Harry in the town’s good graces. She would be the one ensuring the right facts were heard and the right opinions were held. Defending himself would not look nearly as good as being defended by a strong woman like Allison Bennett. Surely a woman of her caliber would not stay with—and defend—a guilty man. Her resolve and her dedication to him would be his absolution.

  “Why are you so concerned?” he asked in a calmer voice. “This isn’t your problem. I don’t need a lecture. I only told you so you’d hear it from me.”

  “Not my problem?” Allison laughed in disbelief. “Do you really think this won’t affect me, too? Yours isn’t the only name that is being dragged through the mud.” She paused, head shaking. “Who is she anyway? You still haven’t told me her name. Is it someone I know?”

  “I don’t know. I’d never heard her name before. She’s some new intern I only met once. Her name’s Kara, I think… Kara Price.”

  “Price? I know the name, but I don’t really know the family.”

  Allison made it her business to know everyone, especially being the wife of the mayor. Aside from raising a child and making a home for her family, it was the closest thing she had to a job. She seemed to take it almost as a failure when she didn’t know someone.

  Harry absently stirred the ice in his cup with his finger. “Why would you? They’re clearly bad people. Anyone who’d raise a daughter like that isn’t proper company. They’re trash. Have to be. How else would you get a screwed-up kid like that? The little bitch is trying to ruin me.”

  Allison began rubbing the gold pendant on her necklace. “You said Calvin Gaines talked to you. What’s his take?”

  “They have nothing. There’s not a single shred of evidence that I did what this girl is saying. Calvin thinks she’s lying too, in fact. All she has is her story and a few cuts and bruises. Anything could have happened to her. She could have marked herself up… or some high school boy… I don’t know…” Harry trailed off into his glass of bourbon.

  “Did he tell you he thinks she’s lying?”

  “No, not in so many words. But he didn’t have to. Calvin’s a smart man. He wouldn’t let some kid string him along. The county made the right choice when they elected him. I was wrong about him. I’m glad he got the job.”

  Harry rose from the couch and crossed the room toward his wife.

  He bent, set his glass on the coffee table, and then gently put his hands on Allison’s shoulders, never breaking eye contact with her. “This is all such a mess. I don’t know what I did to deserve this. But it will be okay. I don’t care what happens. I don’t care what people think or what rumors go around. All I care about is that you know I would never do anything like this.” He paused for dramatic effect. Then: “Honey, you don’t believe her, do—”

  “Don’t even ask me that,” Allison snapped. “If I believed it I wouldn’t be standing here. And have faith in your people—they won’t believe this either. They’ve trusted you for almost a decade, they won’t stop now. We just need to get ahead of this.”

  Harry released one hand and turned away, shaking his head, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger. “God, this couldn’t have come at a worse time. I already have more on my plate than I can handle with the festival a few days away.”

  “I just don’t understand why this girl would accuse you of this,” Allison said. She didn’t appear to be listening to her husband. She was stuck in her own train of thought.

  “I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.” Harry paused, pretending to be hit with a recollection. Then after a moment, he said, “You know, Calvin was saying that maybe it was a boy from school who did it, a boyfriend or something along those lines. He thought maybe this girl’s boyfriend—or whoever—did this to her, and she didn’t want to get him in trouble or be ostracized, so she pointed the finger at me. I guess to a high-school kid I’m as much a nobody as anyone. I just happened to work with her that day, so I was it.” Harry paused again and watched his wife’s face turn slightly. He had her attention so he continued. “I don’t really know how much I agree with that theory, but hell, what do I know? I’m not a cop. But Calvin seemed pretty keen on the idea.” Another lie. It had been Harry who had really put that idea in Gaines’s head.

  Allison paused for a moment, her eyes darting around the room. “Or like you said, she only wants attention. Or maybe it’s money she’s after. Doesn’t really matter what her motive is, at this point. All that matters is that we aren’t the last to the party. Action is better than reaction with this, and we don’t have long before everyone knows about it.”

  It was as though a switch had been flipped inside her. Allison was getting revved up. Harry could see the cogs and gears in her brain starting to churn. If only she knew he was the one who’d set them in motion. If only she knew the whole conversation had been about leading her to this point. Lighting a fire under her ass. Making her feel unappreciated so she felt as though she had something to prove. Getting her to prove they were a “we.” But she didn’t know all that, and she never would, because Harry was always two steps ahead. More importantly, his talent for believing his own lies was too thoroughly practiced to contend with, which made it nearly impossible for someone with even the smallest morsel of doubt to hold their ground against him. That doubt was like stress cracks in a person’s foundation, and he could spot those weaknesses in an instant and chip away in all the right places to bring down what was built atop the faults.

  “What do you have in mind?” Harry asked.

  “You said her name is Kara Price?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if she wants attention, I’ll make sure she gets it,” Allison said.

  Harry smiled inside, but his face kept the look of concern. “What do you mean?” He knew exactly what she meant. It was what he’d been after all along. Allison would be his personal PR team behind the scenes. She had access to the mainline of the town’s rumor mill. “What’re you going to do?”

  “I’m going to tell the right people the truth before they hear the lie. That’s how you beat something like this. Who wants pie after they’ve already had cake?” Her face steeled as she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  “Maybe I underestimated you.” Harry flashed his smile.

  “That’s your biggest weakness, Harry. It always has been. You only see people as you want to see them, not how they truly are.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The shopping bags sat on the end of her bed. They were a small mountain of glossy boutique totes full of new clothes, shoes, and expensive makeup. Kara held out her finger
s, inspecting her freshly painted fingernails. Rose Red was the color. That’s what the woman in Newburyport had told her and her mother, anyway.

  Their girl’s day had helped. For the first time in two days, Kara felt happiness creeping back in. It wasn’t a superficial happiness, either. It wasn’t happiness bought by the almighty dollar. She would be lying if she said she hadn’t enjoyed being spoiled a little, but her delight did not reside in the bags at the end of her bed, nor was it lacquered onto her nails. The happiness was that of subsiding pain. Like the pleasure felt after banging your knee. The pleasure of the hurt fading. The kind of happiness that can only come after something has been endured. Happiness that wasn’t really happiness at all, only the slow ascension back to normality. And that was what had been so great: the day had felt like a normal day. Just two girls out for an afternoon, doing a little shopping. That’s all. They had even stopped for lunch at Captain Jack’s and gotten Kara’s favorite—lobster rolls.

  Kara glanced over at the clock on her nightstand. It was 9:25 on Monday night. Her parents were already asleep. She and her mother had returned home at around five o’clock from their day in Newburyport, and Kara’s father had arrived home drunk shortly afterward. Her parents had argued briefly in whispers in their bedroom, but it had ended more quickly than it started. Kara had never seen her father drunk before. It left an uneasy feeling in her stomach. She knew she probably had something to do with it, and a part of her felt bad for him. A part of her wanted to reach out and hug him, apologize for everything, apologize for what had happened to her, apologize for the new uneasiness she felt around him, tell him she would be better soon, tell him that she only needed some time. But she couldn’t. Something about it just seemed so awkward. Perhaps it was because for her entire life, the tides of consolation had flowed toward her, and now the idea of reaching out to her father in a gesture of reparation, swimming upstream against that tide, seemed so cumbersome in her mind. Things would right themselves on their own. They had to.

  It had been two days since Kara was raped, and she was starting to see glimpses of a life where every single thought did not land her in a fit of anxiety. Sometimes she found that ten or fifteen whole minutes had gone by, and that scene from the back of Harry Bennett’s car hadn’t replayed once. It was something, Kara imagined, she might never get over completely, but it seemed that if she worked at it, she could block it out bit by bit. And if that was the case, then she would devote all her will to forgetting the past. Find a secure closet in her mind, stuff everything toward the back, and shut the door. Lock it and throw away the key. Maybe put up a sign—DO NOT OPEN!—as a reminder, in case she ever found herself standing at the threshold in a moment of weakness. What other choice did she have? It had happened, and now she needed to move on and put it behind her. Besides, was it even that bad? It was just sex, after all. She was planning on losing her virginity this year, anyway. Sure, the way it had happened was wrong. But was it really as bad as everyone was making it seem? If she could get over it, perhaps everyone else could, too. It just wasn’t a big deal, okay?

  Kara ran her tongue over the cut on her lip and bit down on the scab. Pain flared, and her lower eyelids immediately gathered tears. But they weren’t tears of sadness. They weren’t tears of any emotion. Just a physical reaction. She would have had the same results if she’d stared at the sun. She had spent so much of the last forty-eight hours trying to flee from the thoughts and the memories, the emotional hurt of being raped, that in this turmoil she had learned a new skill: to harness the physical pain for good.

  The little cut on her lip was like a safety switch, and pressing it pulled her into the present and out of whatever dark hole the thoughts had led her down. There were no reflections of the past here, no meditations on the future, only the present moment. It was just her and the pain throbbing on her lip. It even had its own little heartbeat, as if it were alive. That was calming, in a way. In these little eddies of peace, these brief moments of serenity, Kara found the strength to move forward. Inches and millimeters at a time, she was putting distance between herself and the back seat of Harry Bennett’s Cadillac. Her methods weren’t ideal, but they worked, and they were her own. That was important.

  Kara was even beginning to entertain the idea of returning to school later in the week. She didn’t know how much longer she could stand being cooped up in the house. Sometimes she would go hours without speaking a single word. In the instances when she became aware of it, she would say whatever word happened to be on her mind, simply so she could remind herself what her voice sounded like… or that it still worked. A return to society seemed like a welcome idea. And the week leading up to Spring Festival was always the most exciting time of the year to be in school. Teachers didn’t give out work, and students got together and decorated the hallways and the gymnasium with vernal themes. She had done this in middle school the year before, but this would be her first time participating in the high school version. Kara thought maybe she didn’t want to miss that.

  What if she saw him, though? A twinge of panic rippled through her. Kara knew Harry Bennett hadn’t been arrested, and from what she’d heard of her parent’s argument a few hours before, she didn’t get the impression he ever would be. That was what her father had been yelling about. It was the only part of the fight that had made it through their bedroom door with any clarity. It wasn’t a surprise, though. She had never expected that Harry would be arrested. A part of her had always understood that he’d probably done what he’d done because he’d known he would get away with it. And right now, Kara would take a return to normality—which she was slowly beginning to recognize, even if it was happening by small degrees—over revenge or justice. She shuddered at the idea of it all being drawn out for weeks or months in a courtroom and in the paper. Gone and forgotten was just fine with her.

  She had no doubt her parents would continue to demand justice. But as far as she was concerned, moving on was the best remedy. It was the only solution that didn’t send a shiver of panic through her, and she was sick to death of feeling that way. Always on edge, always on the verge of tears, stomach raw with acid, muscles sore and tired from no sleep.

  Kara laced her hands behind her head, lay back on her bed, and closed her eyes. The edge of sleep danced on the insides of her eyelids, flashing shades of white and black and red and blue, electric images that didn’t quite align with her conscious mind.

  Then a voice shook her out of it: “Where you been, stranger?”

  Kara opened her eyes and sat up.

  At first she didn’t see anyone, but then the voice spoke again and she recognized it. “Over here.”

  She looked toward the window and saw Ryan Kinsey’s face pressed against the screen, smiling mischievously. “Ryan? How the—”

  He drummed softly with his fingers on the windowsill. “I found a ladder around back. Don’t worry, I was quiet. I didn’t wake your folks.”

  Kara swung her legs off the bed and crossed to the window. “What’re you doing here? You can’t come in.”

  “Good to see you too,” he said sarcastically. “You forget you have a boyfriend?”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been real sick. A stomach bug,” Kara said, holding her abdomen, turning her face away. The light in her room was dim, so she thought he probably couldn’t see her bruises. “I was meaning to call you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m sure. That’s what they all say. There’s someone else, isn’t there?” Ryan joked and then tapped lightly on the screen. “Now c’mon, let me in, just for a sec. I haven’t seen you or heard from you since Saturday. I won’t stay long. I parked up the street.”

  Kara cupped her elbows and crossed her legs awkwardly, almost losing her balance but steadying herself. “I don’t know, Ryan. Now’s not a great time.” Kara looked him in the eyes for a moment, turning away quickly when she remembered her face.

  “I’m not leaving until you let me in,” Ryan said slyly. “How can you deny your Prince Charming? I cl
imbed all the way up this here tower to see my fair maiden.”

  Kara felt the beginnings of a smile. A part of her had anticipated feeling the same unease around Ryan that she felt around her father, but so far she sensed none of it. She was actually kind of glad to see him. It felt like another step in the direction of normal.

  There was something innocent and less threatening about Ryan. It was, perhaps, because he was still very much a boy and not a man. He did not carry that threatening look of hard age in his eyes—the look all men, at some point or another, possessed once life smacked them around a bit. Bitterness, the little twinkle of anger and frustration that flashed when tempers ran high. She had seen it in Harry Bennett’s eyes moments before he’d hit her. She’d seen something like it three years before in her father’s eyes when he had caught her trying a cigarette behind the garage. Her father had never laid a hand on her, though, only yelled and screamed until she was sure his head was going to explode. She couldn’t deny that maybe what she’d seen in her father then had been something different, though, something more good-natured. For a brief moment she felt guilty for comparing Harry Bennett to her father. They were nothing alike. She needed to remember that, repeat it like a mantra if need be.

  “Fine,” she said. “But only for a few minutes. If my dad catches you, he’ll kill you. He still thinks we’re just friends.” Kara pinched the clasps at the bottom of the screen, lifting it a few inches. Ryan took it from there and opened it quietly the rest of the way.

  “Why are you afraid to tell him?” he asked as he swung a leg over the sill into her room. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  “Because you’re older than me, and I don’t think he’d like it.” Kara walked away from the window. When she turned around, Ryan was standing right in front of her. She kept her head down.