Joe Victim

Chapter Seventy-One

My daughter’s name is Abby. She’s twenty years old and has her mother’s looks, the kind of looks I’d like to see on any twenty-year-old girl that I shared a deserted alleyway with. Abby isn’t short for Abigail, but short for Accidental Baby, and me and Melissa are planning on telling that story at her twenty-first birthday party, which is tomorrow. Abby has a great sense of humor and she’ll get the joke. I love her. Abby has changed my life, just as Melissa has. She’s our only child. Abby was four months old when I had a vasectomy, choosing to have it done professionally rather than taking the shortcut of having Melissa take care of it. One child was enough.

My mom will be at tomorrow’s party. So will her new husband, Henry. Walt died a few years ago. He was hit by a car. I’ve always suspected it was a lifestyle choice rather than an accident. My mother is in her eighties now.

One of the best things about having a twenty-one-year-old daughter was her twenty-one-year-old friends. Every weekend some of them would be around at the house and every weekend I kept my hands and knives to myself in fear of going back to jail.

Of course jail is in the past. Melissa saved me. We’ll tell that story too at Abby’s twenty-first. Maybe show some photos of her as a baby, the first time she rolled over, the first time she walked, the first time she killed a pet. After I was shot and saved and healed, the justice system realized I’d been punished enough, they came around to my way of thinking. I was set free. Counseling was part of the deal. I would see Benson Barlow twice a week for ten years and we actually became pretty good friends. Not good enough to socialize, but good enough to chat about the weather if I ran into him on the street.

People say your life flashes in front of your eyes when you’re about to die. I can’t really be sure why my life is flashing at me now, mostly it’s the events of the last few days that are replaying themselves-the trip out to the woods with Kent and her team, the money I earned, the. .

Last few days?

No. That’s not right. It was those few days twenty years and change ago.

It’s a warm morning and the sun is on my face and I’m lying in bed, and from somewhere I can hear Melissa’s voice. I can smell bacon and eggs. I feel happy. I’m content. I’m the man I never thought I would be. There’s a white picket fence outside and later today I’m going to mow the lawns, I’m going to make idle chitchat with the neighbor and help him shift his old fridge from his kitchen into his garage. I can hear Sally’s voice too, and it’s something I haven’t heard in years.

Months.

But there it is now, she’s in conversation with Melissa because Sally is coming tomorrow too. So is Carl Schroder. Schroder turned out to be a pretty good guy, in the end, probably because he ended up spending ten years in jail having the cop raped out of him.

And I feel sleepy and the voices fade a little. Dreams within dreams. My past flashing at me. I open my eyes into a world that is full of Sally. She is leaning over me. Are we sleeping together? I try to get back to the white picket fence where bacon is being cooked in the kitchen, but something is keeping me here, it’s something so strong that I can even feel the pain in my shoulder that I felt back then. I can smell antiseptic. The air tastes stale. The bed doesn’t feel like mine. I’m lying in a stranger’s bed and bad things are happening and I just close my eyes and let it happen, just like I did with my auntie all those years ago. I open my eyes. Melissa is standing by the wall. Sally is hovering over me. The Sally. I close my eyes. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to be with my family.

I don’t wake up.

Things come and go. One moment The Sally is over me, then there is nobody, then she is back. She’s working on the bullet wound. It reminds me of another time, back twenty years ago.

No it wasn’t.

Long in the past, memories that should be dead and buried.

“Where’s Abby?” I ask.

“She’s safe,” Melissa says. “You’ll get to see her soon. She misses you,” she says, which I figure is such a mom thing to say even though my mom has never said it. It also means that the Melissa I knew a year ago isn’t the same as the Melissa in front of me.

A year ago?

The Sally looks jealous-and I realize the crush she has on me hasn’t faded, her love still burns strong and Melissa better not turn her back on her because nothing sums up crazy as much as a fat woman in love.

“It’s her birthday,” I say.

“What’s wrong with him?” Melissa asks.

“She’s twenty-one,” I say.

“It’s the medication,” The Sally says. “It’s messing with his mind, that’s all. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Do you remember our wedding?” I ask Melissa.

She smiles at me and it’s a stupid question-of course she remembers it. Why wouldn’t she? It was an amazing day, made more amazing by the fact that my mother got the dates confused and missed it.

“I love you,” I tell her.

“You’re going to be okay, Joe,” she tells me.

I’m naked from the waist up. My clothes are in a bloody pile at the foot of the bed. It’s no loss-it’s just the cheap jail suit the warden will replace with one of his own, or with thirty bucks from the petty cash drawer. I’m becoming increasingly concerned about how real the dream is feeling. I try to focus on Abby, which kind of works and kind of doesn’t, because when I try to think about her features, I can’t find them. What color are her eyes? What shape is her nose? Her cheeks? Her hair? Then I try to remember Mom’s new husband. I try to remember my sessions with Benson Barlow. I try to remember Walt’s funeral, but maybe I didn’t go. The neighbor with the fridge, what’s his name? And what did Schroder do to get himself locked up?

It’s a bad dream. That’s all. Just like the bad dream I had following the removal of my testicle.

So I go with it. I stick with the dream and see where it leads. My biggest red flag, if I’m looking for one-which I’m not-is that out of all the people I could dream about, why would The Sally be one of them?

It wouldn’t.

I would never dream about somebody like Sally.

The Sally.

Never.

And that, more than anything, tells me that this is real.

“You need to go to a hospital, Joe,” The Sally says.

I look around the room. Sally’s bedroom. This must be a dream come true for her. There’s a poster on one wall of a vase of flowers, but no vase of flowers anywhere. Why not put up a picture of a window and keep the curtains closed? There’s a mirror above a chest of drawers and poked into the side of the mirror are what must be family photographs. They take up a lot of real estate and I guess that’s so there’s less reflective space and less of a chance for Sally to keep seeing herself.

“It hurts,” I tell her, which is perhaps the most honest thing I’ve ever told her.

“The bullet went right through,” The Sally says. “You’ve got muscle and ligament damage. I’ve stopped the bleeding, and you’re okay for now, and I’ve cleaned it, but it’s going to get infected, and you’re probably never going to be able to use your shoulder properly.”

I shake my head at the thought of that, of my shoulder locking up and going into spasm right when I’m in the middle of cut-cut-cutting. “Fix it,” I tell her.

“You need surgery. It’s not going to heal by itself,” she says.

“Then operate.”

“I can’t.”

“Find somebody who can.”

Melissa steps away from the window. She looks down at me and she looks concerned. “I think what Sally is saying,” she says, “is that she’s done all she can. Isn’t that right?” she asks, looking over at The Sally.

The Sally nods. “You should still take him to a hospital. If you don’t want it infected and if there’s any chance of him using it a hundred percent again, then you have to take him.”

Melissa nods. “It’s funny,” she says, “because you’re talking and all I hear you saying is that we have no more use for you,” she says, and she raises her hand and there’s a gun in it and she points it at The Sally, and in the moment I realize that Melissa hasn’t changed at all, that she’s still the same woman I fell in love with, that I’m so lucky to have found her.