She had passed out on the plane back to Hawaii, and that had helped, but soon she would have to pilot the helicopter on the long flight to Monroe’s Island. Even worse, she would have to perform the entire time. She checked her watch. Josie’s plane was scheduled to land in forty minutes. Just enough time for a nap.
But within seconds of closing her eyes and nestling into the little airport’s plastic seats, her satellite phone buzzed. Surprised, Monica checked the area code of the incoming call.
Five seven three, she mused. Missouri. She thought hard for a moment, trying to remember all of her outside connections. The phone buzzed a second time. Hannah? she wondered. No. Hannah’s in Texas. Heather. Yes, that’s it. Damn. Can’t ignore her, not now. She sighed as she checked the surrounding patrons for privacy. A woman’s work is truly never done.
She answered just as the phone began to buzz a third time. She used a voice different than her own. It was a grating but oddly caring voice. This was the one she used for all her mainland personas. “Crisis hotline. How can I help you?”
The voice on the other end was not as scared as the usual calls she took. Then again Heather was not one of her usual callers. “Hi, um… is Monica there? I talked to her a couple weeks ago.” A slight pause. “She said it was okay to ask for her by name.”
She’s in, Monica thought. Then, careful to continue disguising her voice. “Of course. Let me get her for you.” She shifted the phone to her other ear, purposefully clicking one random button in the process to simulate a connection transfer. When she spoke again it was in her own smooth, overly caring voice. Her counselor’s voice.
“Yes, hello? This is Monica.”
“Hi. Monica.” Heather’s voice was still a bit stilted, a bit hesitant. “This is Heather. Heather Grimsley? I talked to you a couple weeks ago. I was the girl whose uncle had-”
“I remember you, Heather dear. How are you holding up? Did you talk to your mother yet?”
A long pause this time. Monica stifled a yawn. She really would need to catch up on sleep when she and Josie got back to the island. “I told her,” Heather said, “but you were right. She didn’t believe me. Fucking bitch.”
“I’m so sorry, dear. But remember, there is often a strong bond between siblings. It may take time.”
“Yeah, I know. You said that.” Another pause, less hesitant this time. Monica smiled, listening for the words she knew were coming. “But you also said there was another way to heal. A more… um… active role in the process? I guess… I guess I’m calling today to hear more about that.” One more pause. One more gathering of strength. Monica allowed the girl to find it. “I’ll never be happy until I can take some revenge. Is that wrong? It feels kind of wrong.”
Monica waited for just the right moment, then bore down. “Not at all, my dear. Revenge is sometimes the only way to heal.”
She talked for another ten minutes to the girl from Hannibal, Missouri, but it was all a mere formality by then. At the word ‘happy’, she’d already bumped Heather to the top of the recruitment list. When they secured a meeting time the following Tuesday and hung up, she considered calling Gertrude to convey the important update, but held off knowing it could wait.
Instead, she ruminated over the oddity of the current situation. It was strange enough that Gertrude had had Josie go on a mission alone, and stranger still that she was bringing back only one man.
But that man… she mused.
Monica would have to ignore that this pig was Charles himself, Josie’s personal abuser, and would have to feign shock and respect should Josie admit who he really was. She would have to restrain her own urge to kick the motherfucker in the balls when she met him. Would have to talk during most of the flight about Josie’s mental condition because that’s what she would normally do. She would have to be on, in other words, because Josie’s reaction to the truth would likely send her right back where she had been ten days before, lost and impressionable and ready to bend to the compassion she thought the men deserved.
But Monica already knew much of the charade would be unnecessary. Unlicensed though she was, Monica was nevertheless talented. Even from afar she had seen a genuine change in Josie and was no longer concerned about her little problem. It was in her higher shoulders, her stiffer neck, the intensity of her eyes. All displayed an impressive presence that made her look more like a damned headwoman than the logical choice for Gertrude’s next second-in-command.
And yet for all this, Monica hesitated when Josie’s plane landed and passengers began to disembark. She remembered another young woman years before who had shown similar promise. That story hadn’t ended well, and she hoped this would not be another disappointment. The Cause always suffered from any serious complications in its younger recruits, but for Gertrude to risk so much for someone of Josie’s experience was unprecedented.
Of course, Josie’s accomplishment today is itself unprecedented.
A few minutes later, the girl herself came sauntering through the little airport door, hanging adoringly on the arm of a grizzled hunk. Monica was at first surprised. In all her years of digging through Josie’s mind, she had never considered Charles could have been genuinely handsome.
Shaking off a bit of fear that Gertrude would learn she had compromised this delicate situation, Monica’s professionalism kicked in and she walked confidently toward the approaching couple.
“A helicopter?” the man was saying. “Seriously?”
“Oh sure,” Josie, said. “They’re quite common here. And Aunt Monica is an excellent pilot. Oh, here she is!” Josie reached her arms outward and fell into Monica’s waiting embrace. How many times had they performed this act? How many times had she wished to know the true thoughts of any of her girls in that moment of public vulnerability? Yet never once had she brought it up in session.
Charles held out his hand to her. “Monica,” he said, “I’m Charlie.”
“Well, well, well,” Monica said smoothly and stepping back to take him in, “Josie didn’t tell me you were so handsome.” She shook his hand and flashed a glance at Josie. The girl’s smile was firm. Confident. Monica returned the grin in kind.
“Come on,” Josie said. “Aunt Monica’s bird is right out here.”
“I can’t believe you own a frickin’ helicopter. That’s so incredibly cool.”
“Yes, she’s my little plaything” Monica said, leading Charles toward another door, “I call her Marilyn, you know… because she turns all the boys’ heads.”
Charles laughed. Josie laughed. Monica laughed. But as Charles stepped into the airport’s rear heliport, the two women went quiet. Behind his back, Monica pulled a small syringe from her pocket and handed it discreetly to Josie. The young woman slipped it into her own pocket, and grabbed Charles’ arm once more.
“I’ll let you sit up front,” she said as Monica popped open the pilot’s side door. “That way I can keep an eye on you from behind.” Charles laughed again, and the two women joined him. He was not the first man who had so easily fallen for Josie’s batted eyes and outthrust chest.
But he was, as things turned out, the last.
3
The girl was young, but not so young that she hadn’t learned the injustices of the world. She sniffed, wiped the tears from her reddened cheeks, and uncrumpled the photograph in her hands.
Fucking bitch, she thought looking at it. Fucking perverted loser dickhead.
Her dorm room was in shambles. She hadn’t realized how angry she’d gotten. A bowl with the dregs of last night’s Ramen soup had been thrown at the wall. Noodles and brown liquid still rolled and stuck there like bad modern art. College Angst it would have been called.
Her bedspread was on the floor, pulled from the bed in a rage of curses when her mother had proclaimed she must have been mistaken and was she doing drugs perhaps?
Her CD stand, a pleasing holdover from her middle school days, was on its side. The fifty jewel cases and several CDs were strewn across the floor and u
nder her roommate’s bed.
When did that happen? she thought. Probably when the bitch said her precious brother was a Little League coach, as if that excused him entirely.
In her whole life, nothing had prepared her for the pain of what her uncle had done to her in less than five minutes. It had taken her weeks to get the nerve to tell anyone. She’d even called a crisis hotline a couple times, wondering if she was crazy or if the world had turned upside down. She’d skipped classes, hadn’t eaten, had hidden in seclusion from all her friends. What seemed the worst of it all was that nobody had even noticed.
Her mother hadn’t called. Her friends hadn’t checked in on her. Her professors hadn’t sent so much as a disciplinary email. It was as if she could disappear forever and the world would never know.
She sat now on the floor between her bed and the wall. A flung pillow had knocked one of her Manga posters from its hook and cracked the frame and torn the brightly-colored paper.
Fuck, she thought, angry at herself for having damaged her own possession. And yet the damaged poster sobered her a little. What am I going to do?
There were counselors on campus. She’d been told about them at orientation, but she’d lightly scoffed at the idea. She would never be the kind of person to need that kind of help. Just an extension on a paper or two, perhaps some extra tutoring for her harder classes. These were the only difficulties she had planned on having.
She wondered if the counselors were professionals or just hired and stuck in a back office to satisfy some law. God she would love someone to talk to who would listen.
The crisis hotline came to mind again, and she put the ravaged photograph aside. Behind it was her phone, and behind that were her hands, one reddened from clutching the phone for the past half hour and the other reddened from a smear of blood.
She opened the phone’s history and found the number easily. She thumbed the screen and toyed with the idea of dialing the number again.
At least they had been willing to listen, she thought. They believed me. And that one woman had sounded like she’d wanted to help. What was her name again? Something from a TV show. From ‘Friends’.
In a moment she remembered and looked down to the phone again. A thin pink haze covered the screen now and she sucked the blood from her cut palm and wiped it from her phone with her other hand.
Fuck mom, she thought. And fuck this life. I’ll call this one number, and that’ll be it. If they answer, I’ll survive. If they don’t, I’ll just kill myself and be done with it.
It was a startling thought, one she’d entertained only in passing over the previous weeks, but also one that suddenly became very real.
“My god, I’m suicidal,” she said aloud. And the sound, the first in the small room since the agonizing click that had sounded in her ear when her mother hung up on her, moved her to action.
She pressed the phone’s REDIAL option and held it to the side of her reddened face. There was a long, silent wait, almost as if the wireless service needed to reach another planet before making a connection.
I’ll just talk to them one time, she thought. Find out what to do.
And if they don’t answer? another, more malicious side of her countered.
But she wouldn’t allow that thought to reach the forefront of her mind. She focused instead on something the hotline woman had said the last time she’d called. Something about reclaiming her life by taking action rather than waiting for others to do it for her. Yes, she liked that idea. She’d like to take action. Serious, violent action on her uncle’s face and on his repulsive, cloying fingers as well. Then she’d finish off by destroying his balls. And afterwards, she’d take action on her mother’s china figurine collection. She’d teach her what it was like to have things she actually cared about being broken.
Finally, the phone rang and each ringing drone seemed to take a full minute, an hour, a year. Then it connected, and the voice that came through was the same grating sound of a lifetime smoker as she’d heard each time she’d called before.
“Crisis hotline. How can I help you?”
The girl set her chin. I can do this, she thought. I may be broken, but with a little help I can heal myself. “Hi, um,” she said. Dammit. Don’t be afraid. Be strong. Just speak! “Is Monica there? I talked to her a couple weeks ago.” She paused, feeling a sudden pulse of panic, but pushed through it quickly. Take action or die waiting, she thought. “She said it was okay to ask for her by name.”
Then silence lingered and the panic returned. What if Monica wasn’t there? What if her advice was some lame shit like doing well in school and having patience and being proud of what she’d already accomplished?
On the other end the grating voice said, “Of course. Let me get her for you.” It was an immediate relief. Somehow, and despite her desperate need for help, the girl felt like she’d just saved her own life.
On the floor beside her, the photograph lay crumpled and torn. She’d broken the picture’s frame in order to do that. The photo featured herself adorned in yellow and green, proudly holding her high school diploma. Her smile was wide. The light in her eyes was infinite. Beside her, Heather Grimsley’s mother shared the same smile, the same eyes, and sported a thumbs-up of appreciation despite being wrapped around her daughter in a mock bear hug.
“Here For You Always,” the picture’s frame had proclaimed. It lay now in shambles, too. Broken and split into a dozen pieces and then a dozen more. It was this wood, these splinters, which had gouged Heather’s hands and made her bleed.
The frame, like Heather’ heart, would never be repaired.
4
My last guard duty, Lucy thought. How does the time fly? Only two more weeks in this lousy place and then I’m free. The tall, muscular woman turned her head from the window and her attention to the long hallway filled with shadows. Well, at least I’ll get to see one more raid before I go.
Gertrude hadn’t set the exact date yet, of course. She rarely was very giving of information when it came to the elusive men of the black sector. But there was no doubt it was coming soon. Somehow the bag of vegetables she’d discovered a few days before had been a key clue to their current hideout. Lucy loved killing men. It was the best part of her life. But raids on the black sector were especially rare and satisfying.
In ten years of service, she had only ever been on the third floor for two reasons: to face Monica in one of her misguided psychiatry sessions, or for nighttime guard duty. She had originally only come up there for the superior view it offered, but as the years had passed Lucy had found the fortress’s forgotten third floor to be more comforting than any place she had ever known. There was something about large, empty places in the nighttime. They were serene, which was something that didn’t seem to exist on the island. Peace, she had found, was seductive.
She’d learned important things up there. Things about herself and about the island. No one knew of her fondness for the place, and she preferred it that way. It made each of her own ‘sessions’ feel more honest.
Monica’s office was unlocked, as usual, but Lucy had no desire to snoop around in there anymore. She’d done her share of playing the nervous thief in the night, and though the information she’d learned from those escapades had been very lucrative, she had long ago abandoned any such needs.
The other doors in the third-floor hallway, all nineteen of them, were padlocked, of course. Armed with the knowledge of where the headwomen stored all the keys, she’d looked into each of those, too, over the years. They had all been nothing more than abandoned hotel rooms, each still eerily decorated with a pair of twin beds, a single courtesy phone, a bolted-down television, and a King James Bible in every nightstand drawer.
The hallway’s most attractive feature was the balcony that circled the open Grand Foyer on the ground floor below. The walls of the Grand Foyer were tall, wide, and festooned with dozens upon dozens of large frames of ‘art’. The frames displayed the island’s retired jumpsuits. Each had b
een worn by a full hundred men, and each of those men had died, many by Lucy’s own hands. She rarely looked at them these days, but tonight she did, focusing not on the three that took prominent locales as the only ones which were black in color, but instead upon random and lowly green jumpsuits. There were many of these, of course, and Lucy had had her share of green kills as well. Several, in fact, bore her name as being the woman who had killed the jumpsuit’s hundredth man, a superficial but pleasing accolade among her kind.
Eventually, she looked out the lobby’s two windows. One faced south toward the green sector, and the other faced north toward the split of blue and black sectors. Out the southern window her eyes spied a large circle of dead grass twenty feet inside the fence. Beside it, another, older spot was finally recovering the fire that had killed so much life there. So much destruction, she thought. So much death. As always, she only perused the outside world a few moments.
Soon she found herself in her favorite place, lounging in the various chairs and sofas, thinking her own thoughts in the deep night and simply enjoying a rare block of real freedom and inner security.
In the last two years she’d been noticing the dented cushions and pressed spots on the carpet from moved furniture. It was nice knowing she wasn’t the only one who used the place to pass time during guard duty. She wondered who these other girls were and what they, if indeed there were more than one, did during their time there. She wondered whether she was truly as isolated as she always felt.
How did my life turn out like this? she thought, walking past the arched doorway to the east wing. I was just a scared, angry child when they found me. Now I’ve spent almost half my life here. She walked slowly toward her favorite chair. And to what end? Were these my dreams when I was a girl? God, I can’t even remember my dreams anymore. A ballerina? Sure, but what little girl hasn’t dreamt of that? There was something, though. A doctor! Yes. I wanted to be a doctor. I’m smart, too. And I’m diligent enough. I bet I could have done it.
Woman Scorned Page 6
