Chinese Handcuffs (6 page)

Dillon said, “Preston . . .”

“You know what I thought about?”

Dillon shook his head.

“Remember Old Lady Crummet's cat? Old Charlie? I thought about old Charlie while I was struggling to get my pants back on up on the pool table. While I should have been thinking how the hell I was going to get down and get more drugs, I was thinking of old Charlie. I was remembering how I told myself, clear back then, if I ever got that far out again—
anytime
in my life—well, that would be the end of me.” He nodded, staring at the Luger. “Well, last night I did it.” He looked at Dillon straight in the eye as he raised the gun. “I left you a note, Dillon. And I left something else.”

He put the gun to his temple; Dillon screamed and lunged for him, but it wasn't even close. He didn't actually see Preston do it, didn't see the blood or the brains or the mess because he jerked his eyes away the moment he saw the pressure of Preston's finger on the trigger. But Dillon heard it. And he saw it in his head.

 

I can't begin to describe what's gone on inside me since that day, Pres. There are lots of times I want to take
the blame. I mean, you said it: If I hadn't been “mirror, mirror on the wall,” constantly serving up the wrong answer, well, things might have turned out differently for you. And I was always so goddamn flip about the reasons I thought Stacy should dump you and pick up on me—way before you ever got involved with dope and all those bad actors. But there was certainly never any danger of her doing it, and I really don't think I ever meant it. Stacy was
hopelessly
yours.

There are other times, though, when I'm so mad at you I want to shove a steel tube down into your grave and pour raw sewage into it. Where the hell do you get off blaming me for your size and temperament? And your
choices,
for Christ's sake. And where do you get off tricking me into watching you die?

There's a lot to consider. I have never loved and hated anyone at the same time and so ferociously as I do you for what you did. My emotions churn inside me like a hurricane, and when it's at its worst, I can only lay back and let them take me away.

I miss you, Pres. I don't miss the drugs and the craziness of the end, but I miss the real you from back before.

Your brother

Jennifer sat on the edge of her hospital bed, absently fiddling with the electric position controls while she read the Sunday paper and waited for Coach to come pick her up. There had been no word from her parents, which didn't surprise or bother Jennifer in the least, but she was anxious to get out of there and get home. She always preferred to be home ahead of them, like a wolf marking the corners of its territory. It gave her the hint of an illusion of power or of safety. Of course, it was
only
an illusion. Her only chance in her war against her stepfather was always to be there first and always to be prepared. When she was away for long, the sense of urgency would creep into her throat until she feared she would choke on it.

“Renee Halfmoon,” a pitiful John Wayne imitation
at the door said, “crawl back into your hole. Jennifer Lawless'll be takin' over in these here parts, thank ya, pilgrim.”

Jen smiled and looked up to see Dillon Hemingway peeking around the doorway at her.

“What're you doing here?” she asked. “Another five or ten minutes I'm outta this place.”

“Less than that,” he said, then slipped back into his fraudulent facsimile of Rich Little doing the Duke. “Ah come to take ya away from all this, ma'am. It's a sorry thing when a heroine the stature of yourself can't find a gown to cover her backside.” In his own voice: “If I invite you to the prom, will you wear that?”

Jennifer glanced down to discover the open back on the ridiculous hospital gown had slid around to the side, exposing part of her hip. She fired the sports section at Dillon. “If you invite me to the prom, I'll wear three rolls of adhesive tape. You won't get your hands on anything but money for my dinner.”

“Tape scissors,” he said, stepping around the doorway and revealing a pair of jeans and a Wenatchee sweatshirt in one hand and Jennifer's underthings in the other. “I'll bring tape scissors.” He threw her the jeans and sweatshirt, then turned toward the hall with the rest. “I'll wait out here with these,” he said. “Just
give me a few minutes. . . .”

“Where'd you get those?”

“Don't you remember?” Dillon asked, feigning affront. “You said it was a night you'd never forget. You said . . .”

“If you're seeing your life pass before your eyes as we speak,” Jennifer said, “it's because the Lord knows it will end in three seconds if you don't give me my underwear.”

Dillon opened his mouth to speak.

“Before you say one more word,” Jen warned.

“Only fooling.” Dillon smiled big and threw the sacred garments in Jen's direction, then stood outside the door while she hurriedly put them on.

“Where'd the sweatshirt come from?” she called to him.

“It was from the warrior's room untimely ripped,” Dillon called back, bastardizing Shakespeare beyond even his own usual limit. “It's a trophy. Like a ground squirrel's tail or a moose head.”

“Where'd it come from?” Jennifer asked again, patiently.

“Renee Halfmoon. She wanted you to have it.”

“Really?” Jen said as Dillon walked back into the room, having sensed she was dressed. “Really? It came from Renee Halfmoon?”

“Really.”

“God, that's
nice.
”

Dillon shook his head. “Chicks,” he said. “You guys really know how to compete. If I'd have been Renee Halfmoon and I played as good a game as she played and still lost, I'd have ripped a set of lockers off the wall, or something dignified like that. Renee Halfmoon gives you her sweatshirt. No wonder wars have to be fought by men.”

“No wonder at all,” Jen said, standing. “Get me out of here.”

Outside, Dillon opened the van's passenger door to let Jen in. Jen knew Dillon's brother, Preston, had owned the van—outfitted with state-of-the-art wheelchair gear, including a lift that Preston had seldom used and apparatus to operate the accelerator and brakes by hand—after he was crippled and before he died. Dillon had not altered it since Preston's death and had in fact, because of an oversight on the part of the Department of Licensing, been able to keep the handicapped license plates. It was never hard to find a good parking place.

Jennifer noticed the plates, as she did every time she rode with Dillon, and shook her head disapprovingly. “You could go to hell for that, you know.”

“I only keep them for Caldwell.”

“Why Caldwell?”

“He called me into his office a couple of months ago to let me know what a slime bucket he thought I was for taking advantage of the less fortunate in our society.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him if they could see my golf game, they'd issue me handicapped plates anyway.”

Jennifer smiled. “Bet he thought that was cute.”

“Not so you'd notice. But it gave him the opening to tell me what a horse's ass I am for withholding my ‘marvelous athletic talents' from the school.”

“I don't get the connection.”

“There isn't one, other than it falls under the general heading of
1001 Ways to Shirk Responsibility,
by John Caldwell as told to Dillon Hemingway.” Dillon pulled the van out of the hospital parking lot and eased onto Grande Avenue, headed up onto the North Hill. They rode in silence a few moments, Jen staring out the window at the sledding hill in Chief Joseph Park, lost in thoughts about the game.

“How'd you get my stuff?” she asked, finally.

“I called Coach,” Dillon said, “to tell her I'd like to pick you up. She said your sister was there at her place, so I dropped by and picked up the key. Where the hell are your parents?”

Jen shrugged. “Why?”

“If I'd had a game as important as Wenatchee, my dad wouldn't have missed it for anything.”

Jen shrugged again. “They're just not into it, that's all. That's okay with me. You know that.”

Dillon nodded. He did know that. He just didn't know
why.
After all the intimate conversations, each riding the freeway of that immediate magical connection running between them, he thought he knew her, and yet he knew almost nothing
about
her. “Could I ask you a personal question?”

“You can ask.”

“You don't have to answer. . . .”

“I know that.”

“How come you wanted your sister to stay at Coach's last night?”

“I didn't know where my parents were.”

“But you didn't want Coach to call.”

“Like I said”—Jen stared out the window again—“you can ask. . . .”

“It just seemed weird, that's all.”

“Almost everything about my parents is weird,” Jen said. “I really don't like to talk about them, okay? I made a decision a long time ago that if I pretend they don't exist, I don't have to deal with them.”

Dillon pulled into the huge circular driveway in front of Jen's house and set the parking brake. “Want me to come in?” he asked.

“What for?”

“How cordial,” he said. “What happened to ‘Why, sure, Dillon. I'll make you a nice cup of hot chocolate in gratitude for your braving the cold and snow to bring me home from the hospital when my parents are nowhere to be found'?”

Jennifer snapped to and gave a short laugh. “I'm sorry. Actually I was thinking I'd like to be alone for a little while before my sister gets back and my parents come home. I didn't mean that to be bitchy.”

She leaned over and gave him a quick hug. “I'll talk to you later—probably tomorrow at school, okay?”

 

Dillon drove slowly back down Grande, cutting through the downtown area, then south on Post Street toward his home, wondering what was being left out of Jennifer's story. He felt a lot for her, might even be in love if he could figure out what to do about Stacy Ryder, bouncing around in his brain like the monster within all of us, but something was missing. Part of it was that some of the time she didn't even seem like a girl to him. She was tall and pretty and athletic and all that—all things he found
extremely attractive in females—but as often as not there were no sexual considerations. He knew that couldn't be coming from him because he had sexual considerations about
everything.
His sister, Christy, had
stuffed animals
he thought were sexy. So it had to be coming from Jen or
not
coming from Jen. And yet she never pushed him away from her in any kind of way that made him doubt his masculinity or think she was interested in someone else. Since their first meeting at school they had spent a lot of time together, got to know each other through one another's pain, in a fashion—a deep,
risky,
trusting fashion—that Dillon almost
never
allowed, especially with Preston's death so fresh in his experience. But there were areas, specifically those around Jen's family, where she just zoned out on him. He knew everyone had secrets. Hell, he hadn't told her everything about Preston, either, but the only reason not to tell was that it took him to a place within himself that he simply couldn't allow anyone to see, the place where he believed that his very existence might have caused the death of his brother. If the same was true for Jen—if there was something
that
dark—something really crazy must be going on in her family.

Deciding there was no sense worrying about what he couldn't change, he forced his crazy thoughts into the back of his mind and drove on home.

 

Jennifer watched out the window as her mother and stepfather pulled their new Chrysler New Yorker into the driveway, watched a second to see that her stepdad was sober, and considered going up to her room and pretending she was asleep. She decided against it and settled onto the couch with her lit book, declining to greet them when they came through the door, instead letting them find her.

“Hi, baby,” her mom called from the kitchen as she removed her boots. “How was the game? We heard you won. The paper said you got hurt. Are you all right?”

Jen fielded only the last question. “I'm fine,” she called back. “Just a bump on the head. They wanted to see if I had a concussion.”

“A concussion!” Her mom came into the living room. “You got a concussion?”

Jennifer hated it when her mother feigned concern—especially after the fact. Linda Lawless had shown her colors time and time and time again when it came to choosing between her children and anything else she wanted to do, and as far as Jen could see, the kids had yet to come in first. She understood that, expected no more, but hated it when her mom came up with these feeble gestures which belied the truth and
which made it all that much harder to protect her mother when the times came. And the times always came. “It wasn't a concussion,” she lied. “They just wanted to be sure.”

“So tell me about the game,” her mom said.

Jen could hear her stepfather coming into the kitchen from outside. Handing her mother the sports section, she suddenly wished she'd gone to her room. “It's all in there,” she said. “They tell it a lot better than I could.”

“Are you mad that we didn't go?”

“No,” Jen lied again. “I'm not mad. I just don't want to go over it all again, that's all. Listen, I'm kind of tired. I think I'll go up and take a nap.”

Her mother hugged Jen's tightening body. “Okay, why don't you say hi to your dad first.”

“He's not my dad,” Jen said matter-of-factly, in exactly the same tone she used every time her mother called T.B. that.

“T.B., then . . .”

“I'll see him later. I'm going to bed.”

She closed the door behind her and locked the dead bolt. It didn't do any good, she had to let him in when he wanted—that was the rule—but again, there was that illusion of safety. Jen was furious at her mother for
suggesting she say
anything
to T.B., as if he acted like a real father, as if he weren't given to drunken rages that sent the whole family out into the night desperate for sanctuary. She pictured herself and her sister standing knee-deep in snow in their galoshes and nightgowns, a packed suitcase apiece weighing them down as their mother directed them to keep to the woods, away from the road so he wouldn't spot them. Her mother would exhibit cuts and swelling and usually some blood as she lugged her own suitcase. These were the only times Jennifer saw her mother as strong: when her mom was terrified and angry and physically hurt and immediately fearful that T.B. would indeed someday kill one of them. The first time Jen saw her mother like that, she really believed that they'd all finally get away, that her mother would finally protect them. The sixth or seventh time—she had lost count—she had seen her mother like that, she knew they all were stuck with it forever. T.B. was too smart and too strong, and her mother was far, far too weak. Jen would have escaped with her sister a long time ago, but she really believed—with good reason—that her mother would be killed or injured beyond repair.

Jennifer lay down on her back and pulled the pillow over her eyes, trying to let the tension drain the way
Coach had taught her. Starting at her head, she visualized it running the length of her body until it exited the soles of her feet, all the time breathing deeply, sucking the air clear down into her pelvis.

 

T.B. seems different from the other men Mom has brought home since Dad left—or rather, since Mom kicked Dad out, sort of. J. Maddy told on Dad, a couple of years after Grampa died. Without Grampa, Dad's nocturnal visits became unbearable for J. Maddy, and so she finally just told. There had been a filmstrip in her second-grade classroom called
Good Touch, Bad Touch,
and it was pretty clear to J. Maddy that what Dad was doing was definitely “bad touch.” In the film they said you weren't supposed to keep that secret—the one about someone touching you bad—that when people told you to keep that secret, it was a trick and you should run and tell your mother, and if she won't listen, tell some other grown-up you trust. J. Maddy doesn't know exactly how it all happened; but she told Mom, and Mom got very angry and said it couldn't be true and that she should never,
never
say anything like that again. So J. Maddy did just what the filmstrip said. She told her teacher. Then a man showed up at school and was nice to her and asked her some easy questions
in the principal's office, and when she got home, Dad was gone. Mom was in tears, and she screamed at J. Maddy (whom she refused to call that, even after J. Maddy had requested it at Grampa's funeral) and told her now look what she had done, but the man threatened to take J. Maddy someplace safe if Mom couldn't pull it together. Mom pulled it together, at least until the man left, and then they went to this woman called a therapist so they could talk without Mom yelling, and when that was finally over, Mom was able to tell J. Maddy that she was sorry she hadn't protected her.