Lie Still

37

Richard Deacon stared at me clinically, like I was a butterfly he wasn’t sure was pretty enough to put under glass. The small camping lantern he set on a box cast hideous shadows on the walls.

He knelt and rested his hand on my stomach, gently.

My breath snagged.

“Caroline got pregnant again.” His hand began to rub a circle. “I bet she didn’t tell you that. On the way out the door, she threw it in my face. That she’d killed my child. She aborted my child in my town.”

He bent over me, and whispered to Misty. I couldn’t hear what he said, but her whimper sliced me like a knife. His arm was inches from my face, while his hand was busy with Misty behind me. I could smell the dank sweat of his armpit. See the black hair growing over a purple bruise near his wrist. Maybe Misty had fought back.

He was wearing a watch with a glowing digital readout. Not an ordinary watch. An expensive GPS runner’s watch. It told me it was 12:43 a.m. Another set of numbers was ticking down minutes and seconds. Mike carried a similar watch, in that black backpack.

“Misty and Caroline, Caroline and Misty. Deciding to give a damn after twenty years.” He straightened. “I’m making a nice little surprise for your husband, Emily. Y’all are all going to heaven today.”

My mind was growing more alert; my body, still a beanbag.

“Don’t make a sound.”

He shut the door, taking most of the light with him.

The moon straggled through the only patch of unpainted glass.

Lie still.

Don’t make a sound.

Why was the house so silent? My body, so numb? What was he doing? How much time had passed?

Windows painted shut. Lock on the door.

Don’t make a sound.

I floated like one of the clouds in Misty’s glass house.

Over mountains. Trees.

Italy.

My parents’ car accident.

The girl in that frat house bedroom.

Helpless. Pinned. Confused.

History, repeating.

I used my foot, the one tingling, to kick backward. To nudge her, wake her up. But she was already awake.

“I’m… sorry about your baby,” she said dully.

“What is he doing?” I spat out the words, angry. At her, for sounding helpless. At Dickie. At God.

“He has Alice.”

She’s alive?

“I just wanted Caroline and Dickie to tell me where. Where their son took my sister. Where they have been hiding him. I love Alice so much.” She choked on a sob.

“Misty, we need to get out of here.” Trying not to scream it, urging my limp body to move.

“I didn’t think Dickie would recognize me after twenty years.” Misty’s voice trembled. “I told him I was a photographer. That I wanted to take pictures on his land. Lies, so I could search that hill for her.”

“Can you move?” I asked. Impatient. Seconds escaping.

No response from Misty.

I pushed myself up a little. The moon had risen. Its yellow gleam shone near the windows, spotlighting a broken antique lamp of my mother’s and an array of half-unpacked boxes. I could see the head of a blue stuffed dinosaur sticking out of one of them. Make out Mike’s Sharpie scribble: Baby’s Room.

My eyes traveled over the crib sheets, bottles, and Pampers stacked in a laundry basket in the corner.

A baby monitor, a shower gift, sat on the floor nearby. Brand-new, out of its packaging.

“Misty,” I said shakily, “I think I’m going to pass out again.”

I watched the doorknob turn.

I scrambled back in slow, painful motion, against the wall, dragging Misty with me.

Dickie, with his lamp, bringing light. The receiver to the baby monitor in his other hand.

“I thought I told you not to make a sound.”

Listening to us. Getting off on our fear.

Dickie, at play.

Lying beside me in my bed. Cigars, and messages in the mirror.

I thought that Pierce was the worst that could happen to me. But this was worse. Because, this time, I should have known.

This man leering over me was not the hick with the shotgun that I met in that schizophrenic house, the guy with the loose Wrangler jeans, the old fishing shirt, the burned-out brain cells, and the limp that bought him disability. This man was the manipulative, smart athlete that Caroline fell in love with. He had played into every stereotype, and I’d bought every second of the performance.

“Please don’t hurt my baby,” I begged, hating myself for it.

“Well, your husband should have thought of that. I lost mine.”

He stood over me, placing his black running shoe lightly on my belly. Pressing.

I kept my breath even.

“Not yet.” He removed his foot, glancing at his watch. “Not yet.”

He moved to the other side of the room, kicking a box out of the way.

Now or never, I told myself.

Dickie stood near the windows, his back turned.

I pushed myself up, using the wall.

I was going to go out standing.

Make him feel something. Mike’s voice in my head, urging me.

“But there were some… good times, right?” I stuttered. “When you and Wyatt wore matching eye patches for Halloween? The trip you took to Dollywood? The picnics? The Christmas you gave Caroline the white dress?”

Dickie flipped around. Red-faced. Pissed.

“How do you know all that shit?” His mouth shifted into a knowing grin. “Caroline told you. Did she also tell you I ripped that pretty white dress off her on Christmas night? She scrubbed and scrubbed, but couldn’t get the blood out.”

I couldn’t stop the hot, bitter hatred flooding into my face. “Caroline didn’t tell me, you asshole. You handed those pictures to me, pictures of your life you probably never bothered to look at once. Pictures that Caroline wished were real.”

I ventured a step, staggered. It took everything in me to remain upright.

“I don’t know what you got in mind, Mrs. Page, but come on over,” he jeered lazily. “We can relive a few good times Caroline and I had in the bedroom.”

My fingers closed around the X-ACTO knife clutched at my side, the one I’d pulled out of my art supply box minutes before Dickie twisted the doorknob. Seconds after I saw the monitor sitting on the box I’d never unpacked.

The tiny green light glowing on.

Did he buy my lie over that monitor? That I was blacking out?

I would go for his throat. It wouldn’t kill him, but I’d never let myself be a victim again.

“No!” Misty’s shriek pierced the room. She threw herself forward. We were falling together, the knife clattering to the floor. “He hasn’t told me where Alice is.”

Misty, sobbing. The skittering sound of the knife flying across the floor.

Dickie tugged a black remote from the pocket of his shorts. Placed his finger on the button.

I’m sorry, Mike. I love you so much. I tried.

I felt and heard the explosion simultaneously.

Icy fragments raining down on me like sleet, a torrent of hot air.

I tried.

Why don’t I feel any pain?

“What the…” Dickie muttered.

The second shot drilled a small black hole in his left temple.

Dickie lurched sideways and fell, dead in a single, perfect second. I stared, disbelieving, at the window that he hadn’t finished painting. It was shattered, wide open to the night and to a red bouffant wig with a mouth.

“I don’t think I can fit through here, although I’m on the point system now.” Letty peered inside the room, lowering a rifle with a telescopic sight. “I ate one of those Outback Bloomin’ Onions today. Do you know there’s fifty-six points in one of those? That’s a lot of damn points.”

She wafted the rifle through the window in the general area of the dead Dickie. I prayed her finger wasn’t on the trigger. “He’s an ugly-ass sum-bitch, as my grandaddy used to say. I would have got him with the first shot if I had my Recon 550. To be honest, I was aiming for his knee. I almost got a bead on him through the picture window a few minutes ago, but he lowered the blinds right as I got him in my crosshairs. I still kind of wondered at that point whether you were kidnapped or having an affair. But he looked sketchy. What’s that blue shit on his tongue?”

Dickie’s head rested in a glistening pool of blood, his tongue hanging like a lazy blue lizard. The ugly sum-bitch I’d thought looked a little like Daniel Craig.

“Gatorade.” My lips formed the word, but I’m not sure sound came out.

“What? Oh, never mind. You two are a damn mess.” Letty squinted at us critically from her perch. “Y’all really owe me now. I’m kind of down in the dumps after filing the divorce papers. Do you know Harry’s set up house in Phoenix with that Mexican maid? With my daddy’s money? Says she’s his soul mate. Bet it’s blow jobs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

The sound of sirens floated through the window, sweet music.

Letty tugged at her lopsided wig.

“Harry loses total brain function when there’s a mouth on his penis. Not that I’ve ever provided that service for him. I told him right from the start, pageant girls don’t do that.”

Letty is at the window.

Her red wig is bobbing in the moonlight. She is impossibly beautiful.

Misty is reciting something, but I cannot understand her.

My eyes land on the sunroom’s French door, and the crosses formed by the molding. On the old, faded comic strips that Mrs. Drury had pasted to each pane, the yellowed glue in the corners.

Dagwood and Blondie, Dennis the Menace, Calvin and Hobbes.

Misty and me, lying in a bed of shattered glass and a monster’s blood.

Guernica in my own house.

“Emily, say something if you’re awake,” Letty commanded. “Misty, stop gibbering.”

“Something.” I croaked it out.

Letty had resumed her perch at the window after calling the Clairmont police to pass on the “situation” and my warning that the house might be rigged to blow.

“Those sirens we heard were goin’ the other way,” Letty informed us. “I heard Cody was supposed to be watching your house, but I saw him in the Whataburger drive-through after my midnight workout at Cute Chubby Girls and he sure as hell wasn’t here when I pulled up. By the way, the operator says your husband should be arriving any sec. She told me to hang out with you and keep you awake. Told me not to touch the house again. That’s why I’m standing on this lawn chair a foot away, kind of shouting. It’s going to take thirty minutes for the bomb squad copter to get here from Dallas. You need new lawn chairs. This one’s crap. Don’t forget the cops don’t want you to move. You listening?”

“I need new lawn chairs.”

“Lucky I dropped by. I decided it was as good a time as any to stick a personal reminder invitation to Caroline’s memorial service in your mailbox since you hadn’t been polite enough to RSVP. I go up to the mailbox, put my ear to the door, and ask myself, Why is Emily using power tools at midnight? My spidey sense was tingling. I got my Ruger out of my trunk, and here we are.”

Letty’s patter was constant, ludicrous, breathtakingly soothing.

I don’t remember passing out, only coming to in Mike’s arms.

Mike and Jesse unrigged an explosive on the back door and carried Misty and me to the waiting ambulance long before a bomb squad helicopter landed on our little suburban street. I’m pretty sure it scared off all of Mrs. Drury’s ghosts for good.