by Lisa Luedeke
“Where’s Sue?” I asked, trying not to look startled.
“She’s on the rag. She got all pissed off and left.” Alec’s eyes were bloodshot and unfocused. “That’s what you get when you go out with a sophomore.”
He looked around the room, then back at me, like he was noticing me there for the first time. I wondered if he was on something. I’d heard somebody in the barn talking about doing OxyContin.
“She’ll be back—”
“She’s a wench,” he interrupted. “I can’t wait to get out of here next year. Meet some mature women.”
There was something not right with Alec. Something beyond the usual. He didn’t seem like himself somehow—not like the cool, confident guy who had showed up at my house past midnight, demanding to be let in nearly four months before. There was something different tonight, simmering right below the surface.
Music blasted from the barn; even with the house shut up tight against the cold, I could hear it. You couldn’t have a conversation out there over the music. I glanced at my watch.
“That’s right,” Alec said, “it’s ten till midnight. Everyone’s gone back to the barn to do the big countdown. We’ve got the whole house to ourselves, Martini.”
I started for the door, but Alec reached out one long arm from where he sat on the bed and wrapped it around my thighs, tripping me and pulling me back.
“Alec!” Adrenaline rushed through me and I jerked away quickly, making for the door, but Alec stood up, jumped in front of me, and blocked my way. I was tall, but he was bigger. My forehead just touched the tip of his nose. His breath was musty and sour with beer. He reeked like a kitchen floor after a keg party.
“We could’ve had a great time, Martini. Why did you have to fuck it all up?”
He let me take a step backward. He still blocked my only exit, and he knew it. Except for the door to the bathroom. That was behind me. If he wouldn’t let me by, I’d go in there and lock the door, and wait until Stan or someone came looking for me.
“I told you, Alec, I’m sorry about the accident. I really am. I wish it had never happened.”
He shook his head and scoffed. “Not that, Martini. That’s over.” He put his hand up to his face, feeling the ridge of the scar that was already not as strikingly purple as it had been four months ago. “I’ll always have this to remind me of you, though. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a better memory?”
My heart raced. Maybe Stan would come looking for me now. He’d been sticking close to me all night, joking with me, making me laugh. Talking about toasting in the new year with me. He must be wondering where I’d disappeared to.
“Stan’s waiting for me …”
“Stan!” Alec’s wide eyes mocked me. “So it’s Stan now? What happened to your little friend Matt? Couldn’t keep up with you?”
“Matt and I …” I stopped. Why explain myself to Alec? I put a hand out boldly to push him aside. I was damn sick of Alec. I was getting out of there. “I’ll see you later.”
“Whoa, Martini,” he said, and grabbed my wrist, twisting my arm around and down to my side.
“Hey—!” I started, but I tried to stay calm. Alec had always been a bully, but he was all bluff. That’s what Cassie had said once. But this time Cassie was wrong.
“Are we finished?” he whispered, twisting my wrist harder. “I don’t think I said we’re finished.” The pressure on my arm was intense.
“Let go of me, Alec,” I said quietly.
“I’d like to, Martini, but I can’t, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“You’re over me, is that it? Forgotten all about your pal Alec who saved your ass?”
I wasn’t looking at him now. My wrist was twisted, my arm pinned to my side, but he still couldn’t make me look into those eyes.
“Remember how sweet it was over the summer? All the time we spent at the lake? You fell for me, Martini. You wanted me.” He twisted my arm harder. “What was it, Martini? What was it about me you liked?”
His face pressed against my cheek, his breath rancid. He had to let go of me. My wrist was strong, but not as strong as he was. It was going to snap, I could feel it.
“You seemed like a nice guy,” I whispered.
He released my arm and I let out a single cry as my wrist dropped to my side, limp, throbbing.
“You seemed like a nice guy.” He stepped away from me now, but he was still blocking the door. “I don’t think so, Martini. You wanted to fuck me that night after the Bethel party. You were practically begging for it.”
“You’re disgusting, Alec.”
“You know, you never thanked me for the gift I left in your jacket pocket.” He shook his head. “And all I’d wanted was to remind you of the good times. There are a lot of things I like about you, but when it comes to gratitude—I gotta tell you, your attitude really sucks.”
My heart was pounding. His eyes burned into my face. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Tell me how we can end this properly. Tell me that.”
My palms were sweating, my left wrist still pulsing. I had to get away from him. “I don’t know.” My voice cracked.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. His voice was low and even. “You owe me, Martini.”
I made a break for it. Faking one way, then moving the other, I threw him off balance for a moment and ran for the bathroom, but he was behind me and as I tried to slam the door shut, he caught it and pushed harder on the other side.
“Open the door, Martini,” he said, and heaved his body against it. “Open the fucking door.” He shoved it against me, knocking me back.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Martini. You know, you really have a way of taking the fun out of things.”
There was no way I could get around him in this little bathroom. His whole body filled the door. What had I been thinking? I was trapped, cornered. Suddenly, I was enraged.
“Fuck you, Alec!”
He grabbed my throat with one large hand and shoved me against the wall. I felt my body slam into the floor, my head smash into the tile, a blast of pain. The bathroom was a blur of light and color. I could barely see his face, but I could feel him pushing me down with one arm, tugging at my jeans with the other. Kick, I thought, and I did, but he tackled me with his full weight, pressing me into the frigid floor. How had this happened? You fucking bastard, I thought, and I tried to say the words, but nothing came out. A hand gripped my throat; he was fumbling now, one knee shoved hard into my stomach, up under my ribs. I thrashed, tried to kick, tried to move so I could breathe, but trying to free myself made it worse. There is no air, I thought. He is crushing me, crushing the life out of me. Voices rose from the barn, counting down the new year in unison. No one was here. No one was near. He was going to kill me and no one would ever know. I struggled, but Alec gripped me harder, his movements growing more intense. He ground me into the floor, burying me.
I stopped moving then. I’m dying, I thought, and with this, a sense of relief fled through me. My eyes found the ceiling light above and focused. Such a white light, bright, piercing. Spots danced before me: gold, gray, fuchsia. Fuchsia. A funny word to think of at a time like this. But I was floating, my mind flowing like a river. My soul drifted away, severed itself from my physical body, and now I felt nothing and was nowhere but in this space with colored lights flashing before my eyes. Alec’s weight, his nasty breath, his lunging body were gone, on some other girl in some other space far away while I floated on to a safer place where none of this was happening.
40
The house is quiet below.
Stan knocks on the bathroom door, turns the handle:
Katie?
I’m sick. (Is that my voice?)
You sound horrible. Are you okay?
Shut the door please. I’ll be down soon.
I’ve been looking all over for you.
Sorry.
Sorry—as if I just hadn’t been thinking, or had spent too mu
ch time fixing my hair. But Stan didn’t know.
I’ve been sick—really sick, I say. The flu.
Somehow, my clothes are back on, nothing ripped, nothing askew. I find a brush, grip it in a shaking hand, pull it through my hair. A searing pain at the back of my head. I don’t look in the mirror.
Stan looks me in the face when I come out. You’re blotchy as hell.
I’m sick. I need to get home. Please take me home.
Stan warms up the truck. Drives me, slowly, on the slippery white road. Puts his big arm around me and guides me into my house.
Jesus, you’re shaking, he says. That’s some flu.
My teeth are chattering so bad we both hear them.
The fire’s almost out. Stan stokes the stove, opens the damper, lets her rip until the room is hot, then fills the stove again and closes the damper halfway so it will burn all night long.
Where are the blankets?
I can’t remember. I huddle on one side of the couch under a crocheted afghan, shivering, my teeth bouncing like Chiclets.
Stan finds some upstairs and brings them down, tucks them around me. I fall asleep and when I wake, suddenly, he’s still there, dozing in the recliner. When the sun comes up, he’s gone. His note says Hope you feel better. Love, Stan.
It’s cloudy still and spitting snow. I turn on the lights one by one, moving through the house from room to room. There is a deep pain running from one side of my head to the other and a lump on the back where it slammed against the wall. Or was it the floor? It doesn’t matter.
It’s still early when Will appears.
I’m filthy, dying for a shower. Don’t let anyone in the house, I tell Will first, and he looks at me strangely.
Promise?
Sure, he says, confused.
Why are all the lights on? he asks.
Why aren’t you snowboarding with Ben today?
He’s sick. What’s wrong with you?
Flu.
You look terrible. Want some ginger ale?
I nod.
Don’t leave, I say as I head up the stairs.
Why? he says.
Just don’t. I’m practically yelling at him.
Okay, okay. He doesn’t know whether to be mad or scared.
*
Days pass. Everything runs together in my head. Is it Thursday or Saturday? There are two images lodged in my brain. One is of the bright light on the ceiling of Stan’s parents’ bathroom. The other is Alec’s face, looking like he wants to kill me. No one knows it, but he has succeeded.
The images are just underneath my eyelids, blocking my view of everything else. First one, then the other: light, face, light, face. They flash on and off as they please. It is as if time stopped when I was there on the cold tiled floor, and I can’t get up off of it. I’m stuck. Lodged there.
No one knows. No one even knows I was there, on the floor.
Except Alec.
When I think about him I run to the kitchen and vomit into a piece of Tupperware.
*
My throat hurts. It’s still hard to breathe. It’s like he squeezed something shut with his fingers and it can’t open back up. I’m running out of clean turtlenecks. The purple finger-shaped bruises on the flesh of my neck and arms are like footprints. They are Alec saying I Was Here. I stare into the mirror in my room, willing them to go away. They look separate from me, detached—over there. They’re on the neck of some other girl I don’t know. I’m floating away, looking on from a distance. This is getting familiar.
*
Nights are long. Shadows move across the room. I’ve never been so tired, or so wide-awake. During the day I sleepwalk, my brain shuts down; at night I’m on high alert. My brother rolls over in his squeaky bed across the hall and I think I’m having a heart attack. A field mouse runs through the wall and my breath stops. My lamp is on the floor where I’ve knocked it over trying to turn it on fast. Old sounds, familiar. Now, since Stan’s party, I can’t sleep here anymore. Happy new year, Martini.
I start to fantasize about guns and tall buildings. I picture myself doing the perfect jackknife off a fifteen-story building somewhere in Portland and Matt yelling, “Ten!”
Underneath the kitchen counter, in a cabinet next to the sink, I check the bottles of wine. My stash has diminished. But there is a new jug of white my mother must have brought home. The gallon jug has no cork like the tall, slender bottles in the movies, which had been a relief the first time I stole into the kitchen late one night in August, filled a glass, and went back up to bed. It was the color of ginger ale without the bubbles. All fall when I drank it, the pictures in my head—Alec bleeding, the car smashed into the trees—blurred, then shook free and drifted away. Finally, I slept.
This can work again. It has to.
*
For the rest of winter break, Will stays home and takes care of me. He makes me cans of soup that I can’t eat, brings me packages of saltines, plates of toast. I nibble at them while he watches me, then throw them away when he’s in the bathroom or upstairs. I don’t want him to think I don’t need him. Then he might leave.
I refill my own “ginger ale.”
I shake all the time. Will goes up to our rooms and collects blankets and heaps them on the couch, where I sit all day long. He watches TV. He thinks I do, too.
The fire Will keeps tended makes me sweat, but still my teeth chatter. I wonder if they’ll shake loose and tumble out of my decomposing body like they would on any other corpse. My mother calls a couple times a day to check in. I tell her I still have a temperature—a flat-out lie. But these are extreme times and flat-out lies will be called for. There is no guilt now. The old rules are for other people. No one protected me from Alec and no one will protect me now except me. I am my own human shield. I’ll do what I have to.
My mother advises fluids and sleep. I follow her instructions in the rhythm of the images that still move like flash cards through my head: fluids, sleep, fluids, sleep. I can’t do one without the other. When the white wine is gone, I switch to the dark red, which I pour into my white plastic water bottle from field hockey so Will can’t see.
Stan calls to check in; Will tells him I’m too sick to come to the phone. Matt tries to come over. If I’m not asleep, I pretend to be. Will sends him away. He is the guard at the gate. Cassie is still in England with her family for the Christmas holidays, having fun with her summer boyfriend.
I care about one thing: getting through the day. Will tells me it is January fifth. So far I have survived five.
*
Here, this will make you feel better. Will puts a bowl of Chicken and Stars on the coffee table in front of me. He has taken to looking at me like a concerned stranger helping a homeless lady on the street. Like he wants to help but he’s afraid I might go mental on him.
Thanks, kiddo.
I wipe at my eyes with the back of my hand. I don’t want to start crying and scare him, but it’s a new stage I’m in. First I shook, now I cry. The chattering has stopped. My teeth are saved. Will’s been doing this for nearly a week, taking care of me; he hasn’t been snowboarding once. He knows that something is terribly wrong. The fear in his eyes makes me cry harder.
I’m fine, I say, forcing my lips into a smile. But my face is purple, my eyes red—I’m a walking bruise. My cheeks are soaked. It’s too big a lie.
What do you think you have? he ventures.
Oh, just some flu. I hate being sick. It makes me depressed. I’m such a baby. I try to laugh. He stares at me.
He’s talking to our mother: Something’s wrong, Mom, she’s acting really weird. Crying all the time.
He doesn’t see me behind him.
Let me talk to her. I grab the phone.
Is something else going on? she asks.
The guy I was seeing broke up with me, I say. It’s a language she can understand.
I didn’t know you were dating.
How would you?
Do you want me to come home?
No, I say too quickly, then adjust my tone. You need to work, Mom, I say. I’m okay.
*
I’ve taken care of Will so many times over the years when it was just the two of us at home. I can see he wants to do the same for me. He brings me all the stuff I’ve always given him.
Don’t forget your own dinner, I say.
He sits in the recliner across the room and watches me eat. He’s grown quite a few inches this year and is just over five feet now. He’s starting to look more and more like our father: fair skin and a straight nose, a few light freckles. His blond hair is getting darker. But it’s his smile that matches our dad’s to a T, right down to the sliver of a gap between his two front teeth.
Are you going to school tomorrow? he asks.
School is tomorrow? I have not been able to think this far ahead. But now, as he asks it, I realize I cannot imagine leaving this house.
No, I say.
*
Monday is hell. I know as soon as the bus pulls away with Will on it that this is a mistake. I am alone and terror is ripping through me, stealing my breath away. The walls are coming down on me, I’m sure of it. Then, in a moment of clarity, I have a new vision. Not the light on the bathroom ceiling, not Alec’s face. It’s a new picture, like a cue card in front of me: the bottle of tequila sitting in the back of my closet underneath a pile of dirty clothes. I’ve been saving it. It’s made me feel better for months knowing it was there—just in case.
That case is now.
It does not take a whole bottle of tequila to pass out, which is a good thing because I know I’ll need some more again soon. I will place an order with Stan today. By the time Will’s bus rolls back by at three thirty, I am awake and throwing up. One of the things I love about alcohol: You always know what to expect. If you drink enough, you’ll pass out. Every time. Puking is now a small price to pay.
I wake up Tuesday to the sound of wind whipping round the eaves of the house and a snowplow droning down the road in the distance. I pull up the edge of the shade, peek out the window, and through a swirling white mass see that everything is covered with piles of fresh snow. It is an act of nature. A gift from God. After one day of school, I have a reprieve and company.
