Ashes to Ashes

by Nathaniel Fincham

  Chapter 46

  A single lamp was still all that lit the living room and Bam stood in the thick shadows of it, glaring with disgust upon her father, who was still tied to the stiff, uncomfortable chair. Most of his face was back lit by the lamp, darkened by it, but Bam could see that the smirk was still planted on his lips. Even though Lucky Barrett sat below Bam, He still seemed to be looking down on his daughter, as if he always remained on high.

  Exactly how high did her father believed he sat? Bam wondered.

  When Bam had met Scott, she instantly knew that they had something in common, something that was deep within their psyche. She hadn’t been lucky enough to have had any classes with Scott, maybe their meeting would have been quicker, their coupling faster. Instead, she met him before and after basketball games, which she enjoyed attending on a regular basis. She didn’t go to games to hang out with friends nor was an acquaintance of a player, she was someone who enjoyed going to the YSU Penguin games solo, because it calmed her, making her forget about tests and other life involved stresses. Like being the daughter of dangerous and well-known man.

  Also, college basketball games flowed with adrenaline, like a drug to the vein. It was intoxicating.

  A couple of games had passed before she got a good look at Scott, but that first glimpse she recognized a kindred spirit in him. He was more than a mere dumb athlete. Sports were a way of escape for him, as it was for her. And he was escaping something similar. She could see it in his eyes. At the time, she didn’t know what he was fleeing from. She later found out that they were escaping from the same thing…their father.

  Bam had managed to eventually get near to Scott so that she could spark up a conversation. The spark was instant. The reaction was immediate. And the fire had been burning brighter and faster and harder from one day to the next.

  It was love. It was understanding. It was at the core of them both. And when Scott had trusted her with the story of his father, the role that his father had had in the death of his mother, she knew exactly how tight their bond would be. Like the fusion of bone.

  She went on to tell Scott about her own father, Lucky Barrett. She had been nervous at first, because the name of her father was known in the area, most of the time for despicable things. But it was rightly so. Lucky Barrett had earned what people often said about him. He had once been just another business man in a wealthy business family, but her father turned crooked and chose a life of the negative type. That life didn’t stay with him, though, but spread into other members of her family.

  Her uncle Franklin.

  Others.

  Bam had not wanted Scott to associate her with her father and his lifestyle choices, because she was not like him and fought day after day to be less and less like that man. She cared how Scott viewed her.

  While growing up under the care of Lucky Barrett, Bam had seen things that many children were unable to internalize in healthy ways. Violence. Greed. Death. She was always surprised that she had never shown up on the police’s radar because she was one of those people that knew where some of the bodies were buried, so to say. But no one ever honestly asked her to dig and she never volunteered.

  The first chance she got, Bam left her father and her family and blended into the population of Youngstown State University, a small campus compared to places like OSU, but it worked for what she desired. She could have gone to Ivy League schools like Yale or Harvard, but she refused to let her father pay for the expensive schools.

  Year after year, her father had become somewhat of a recluse, which made it even harder to be at home. He rarely left the house, choosing to work through others. He was often paranoid. It appeared that his sanity might have been slipping. Bam believed that she understood the paranoia…the reclusion. It made more sense since she had taken the pill herself, the pill her father had cradled for years, always on him or within arm’s reach. She couldn’t say for sure how long her father has had his pill, but it had been a long time. She always thought it to be a vitamin or some kind of narcotic, but the way he coveted it made her curious.

  How did she even get the pill? For a second she almost couldn’t remember. It had been simple chance, she recalled. She had taken a rare and unplanned trip to her former home a few months after getting into YSU so that she could gather up a few of her favorite books from the library. Bam wasn’t a general reader, but there was a choice group of novels she had cherished while growing up. The Giver. A Wrinkle in Time. Fallen Angels. Fade. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And The Hobbit. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason why these novels had a place in her heart, but they did. And her father would have never realized that they were gone. To him, the library showed off prestige and intellect, as only a large room full of read and unread books could.

  She had crept into the large and quiet building, knowing that her father had most likely been self-quarantined to his office. After hushing the butler, Mr. Groves, with a finger to her lips, she had snuck into the library, which had been as empty as always. It hadn’t taken long to locate the books. On her way to leave, she had been stopped by a sight. On one of the three reading tables had sat two black and gold containers. She had become unable to move.

  Her father’s pills. two of them. He never misplaced them. But there they had sat. And why the black and gold containers. She never understood it. Symbolic? She didn’t know.

  Breaking into a motion, she had grabbed the containers and bolted out the library door.

  She wished that she would have never have taken it. Or talked Scott into taking one.

  The chair still sat in front of Lucky. Bam reluctantly lowered down and became on equal ground as her father. She shook with nervousness, which caused her fingers to tremble. She wasn’t sure what to say. Instead, she moved in close to him and helped him to drink the glass of water she had brought from the kitchen sink.

  Lucky drank ravenously.

  “Thank you, Amber,” he told her once he had drank down most of the glass. “That was nice.”

  “Don’t take it as a sign of peace,” Bam told him. She paused for a moment and listened for Scott’s snoring, which had been nearly nonstop since he had fallen asleep. After crawling into the bed to lie next to her, Scott had fallen swiftly into slumber. “There will be no peace between us. There will never be.” She tried to put pressure behind her words but knew that they sounded nothing but weak. She never had much of a voice when it came to her father.

  Time to find one, she told herself.

  “I know,” he replied. “Peace is an overrated idea, anyway. Peace is for those people with limited foresight.”

  “I have no doubt that you would see it that way,” she said. She couldn’t help but to laugh at his egotism. That type of mindset seemed to run in her family blood. But not her. And even though he sat restrained in a wooden chair, Lucky Barrett would not be helpless, he would not allow himself to be held to any fault. “You still won’t say it, will you? After all this time? What the hell is wrong with you?” Her voice cracked beneath the question.

  “What are you talking about?” Lucky asked.

  “My mother,” she threw at his face, as if the words were venomous saliva. “You still won’t tell me that you are sorry. You still won’t allow yourself any blame. You still don’t care. What kind of person are you, father?”

  “A strong one,” he said.

  “I don’t see a strong man,” she replied. “I see a cold person, someone who is dead inside. You are the reason that I am so fucked up. You are the reason that I am angry all the time. You are the reason that I don’t have a mother to hold me. Don’t you care?”

  “I never said that I didn’t care,” Lucky said.

  “You never said you did, either,” Bam shot back.

  He nodded and said, “I’ve always loved a good family reunion. It reminds me where I’ve come from and how far I have to go.” His words were a sarcastic slap in Ba
m’s face. And Bam reacted with a literal slap to his face, which drew some more blood from the man’s cocked lip. It felt good. But it also made her feel sad. She shouldn’t enjoy drawing blood from her father’s lip, even if he deserved it.

  She put down the cup of water, left her father’s sight, and retrieved a dish towel from the kitchen sink. Returning, she began to wipe at some of the blood on her father’s face. She was gentle with the cloth, but the cloth was dry and only managed to wipe away a small portion of the wet or dried blood. The rest smeared and spread.

  She then took a glance at the gunshot wound on his lower leg. It had been recently wrapped with a small dish towel and seemed to have stopped bleeding. But beneath the towel, the wound was most likely infected or on its way to infection.

  Bam thought about going upstairs to the bathroom and getting the bottle of rubbing alcohol from the cabinet. But she hesitated. Her mind felt twisted, which was the reason that Scott had not wanted her to speak with her father alone, because she should not be trusted with him. No matter how much hurt Lucky Barrett had caused his daughter, deep down she still wanted some type of approval from him. It was a viscous circle, one that she fought to break by running away to YSU.

  Bam dropped the rag next to her chair and sat back down.

  Be firm, she ordered herself.

  “My mother died by a bullet that was meant for you,” Bam continued, trying with all her might to properly confront her father. “Did you know that it was coming? Did you see yourself die and choose to replace yourself with my mother? Is that what you did?”

  “I don’t understand the question, sweetheart,” Lucky responded. “How could I have known what was going to happen? How could I have seen myself die? That…just isn’t possible. It was out of my control. Fate. Destiny. Or a simple unavoidable disaster. I could not have known. What drugs are you on, sweetie?”

  Bam slapped him again, much harder than before. Instead of cleaning him up, she let her father bleed.

  “You know damn well what I am talking about,” she said, the words being ground between her clenched teeth. “You know damn well what I am talking about. I took your pill and I know what it does. And so does Scott. And I now know that you let my mother die in your place. You knew that that motherfucker was going to come for you and you made sure that mom was in that driver’s seat. Didn’t you? Didn’t you? It was no accident. Was it?”

  Lucky stared back blank, emotionless, and without reply.

  It pissed Bam off.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he finally replied. “A man on a motorcycle shot and killed your mother. Not me. I don’t know what you think is going on here, but you are far from right.”

  “I took the pill, dad,” she replied. “I took it. You can’t deny what it is and what it does. I know from experience. And it’s the reason why all of this is happening to Scott. You are the reason. All of this is your fault, father.”

  “What do you think you saw, Amber?” he asked.

  “Flashing lights. Life…draining from my face,” Bam began. “I was dying…in a fog of shouting and confusion. That is all I know. It wasn’t entirely clear.”

  “Sounds like you had a bad trip,” Lucky said. “Nothing more. There are some potent drugs on the market these days. Just say no.”

  “Where did you get the pill?” she pleaded. “What is it? Where does it come from? Tell me. Tell Scott. Tell us. Please.”

  Lucky popped his shoulders, shrugging in the vain way he often did.

  Bam was on her feet at once with her hands wrapped around the man’s neck. She began to squeeze. “I want to squeeze the life out of you. I want to you watch the shit come out of your ears. Would that be funny? Would that be funny to you?”

  “You are not going to kill me,” he managed to mutter.

  “How are you so sure?”

  “I would know,” he choked out. “Or so you choose to believe.”

  Bam let go. Frustrated. “Maybe I won’t do it. But Scott will. If you don’t give us some answers.”

  “He won’t either,” Lucky chuckled. “I’m going to be alive for a long time to come. Believe that, my dear daughter.”

  “The future is not set,” she stated. “Scott has proven that, like I’m sure that you have quit a few times.”

  “The future has been pretty reliable for me,” he told her. “Too bad your mother didn’t have that luxury.”

  “You bastard,” Bam curses. Before storming from the living room, Bam picked up the cup and tossed the rest of the water in her father’s face. She hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. Scott’s snores could still be heard. Taking a deep breath, she climbed the stairs.