Authors: Brian Hodge
10
After Erika Jennings fled that shabby theater, choking back tears, she knew it didn’t matter where she went, what she did, how anonymous she made herself feel. Fact was, she’d never be just like everybody else. She’d always be set apart. A misfit. A mutant.
She drove to the riverfront and parked near the Gateway Arch, that silver-skinned monolith that reminded her of an enormous croquet wicket. She always felt humbled in its presence, maybe because she was such a tiny speck beneath it, and she wandered around its base.
On the drive below, a group of late-hour revelers had walked down from one of the bars up at Laclede’s Landing. One stumbled, they all laughed. They took no notice of her.
“You guys are so blissfully ignorant,” she whispered toward them. “You belong with the rest of them in the movie.”
Because something bad was on the wind, she knew it now, something utterly
wrong.
Something so bad that, if it had a face, it could send you into gales of lunacy just for gazing upon it. She understood, she felt…she knew.
And so she walked.
* *
“How long has it been since you’ve worked?”
“Hmmm?” Erika had heard her mom plainly enough. But if you could stall for time, there’s always the chance something else would come up.
Her mother, Gloria, paused as she sliced fat from cubes of stew beef. “I asked how long it’s been since you’ve worked.”
“About a week, I guess. About that.”
Not since after I woke up scared enough to wet the bed again after all these years.
“I didn’t realize you’d put yourself on vacation again.” She scraped the last of the beef from the cutting board onto the vegetables in the crock-pot.
Erika tried out a disarming smile but didn’t think it did much good. When her mom got ticked, she got that way to stay, as if getting her money’s worth. “That’s just part of the job, Mom.”
“Think again. You can work whenever you darn well please.”
She’s got you there, might as well fess up.
Erika worked as a Kelly girl, filling in for sick or vacationing office employees, and she
could
work as often as she wanted. That was the only thing that had drawn her toward this job in the first place, the safety net of knowing she could take a few days’ respite to reassemble her head when needed.
“You know, I’ve been wondering if this has something to do with that night last week when you didn’t come home ’til after daylight.”
Erika loudly scraped a plateful of carrot shavings into the trash. Let that do her talking for her.
Gloria tapped her on the arm, pecking with her fingers like a bird. “Are you in some kind of trouble?” And that face of hers…so maternally suspicious, wary.
Erika almost had to laugh.
Are you in some kind of trouble?
Come on, let’s skip the watered-down version. Let’s cut through the crap and get down to the
real
questions.
“You mean am I pregnant?” Erika asked sweetly. “You mean have I been screwing around again? Is there dust on my Tampax box?”
Gloria eyed her with distaste. “You don’t have to speak about it like a sailor.”
Erika sighed. “To answer your question, no, I’m not in any trouble. You know as well as I do that I’ve been a lone wolf for quite a while.”
And now she’ll start in on me about how I spend too much time alone, and how I should get back to college.
Gloria added beef bouillon to the crock-pot, covered it, turned it onto the high setting. Stared at the countertop a long moment. “It’s something else
,
then, isn’t it?” she finally said.
“Mmm-hmm.” Mild surprise on Erika’s part. She suspected that it had been in the back of her mom’s mind all along, the little crew in Erika’s head that ran the previews-of-coming-attractions. But it certainly wasn’t like Gloria to bring it up in conversation. Her dad tended to skirt that issue whenever possible, but he was a talkative fool compared to Gloria.
Erika waited for more from her mom, but there was none. Just like always. Sweep it under the rug and it goes away, simple.
“Mom,” she said after a moment, “you said something a minute ago about putting myself on vacation. That’s not a bad idea. Why don’t we take a trip, all of us? Dad’s pretty much free to let himself off for a couple weeks, and Cal’s out of school. Why don’t we?”
A desperate idea, perhaps, but when images of diseased and burning people haunt your mind, where’s the harm in a little desperation? Why not kiss St. Louis goodbye for a while, before it struck? Whatever
it
was. An epidemic? Maybe an industrial accident, or a chemical spill. The Red Death? So many pleasant choices.
Her mother hadn’t answered.
“Mom?” Erika asked. “How about it?”
Gloria’s mouth became a grim, taut line. Erika involuntarily flinched back. “I
know
why you’re saying this all of a sudden. I
know.
”
Her breath came quicker, nervously. “
I know.
And I don’t want to talk about it with you anymore.”
“We haven’t talked about it at all.” Erika took a step forward, her heart sinking when she saw her mom take a fearful step backward. “Please, Mom? Why not?”
“Because it’s not natural!”
There. It was out in the open. The two of them faced each other like adversaries instead of the closest of allies, and both knew it could never be taken back. Erika shut her eyes and dipped into the reserve of strength she kept for such moments. Whenever isolation was the only answer. Whenever someone she’d invested love and trust in had flung it back. Only this time the love and trust had built up over twenty-two years, and she wasn’t sure if that reserve was going to be enough. Not this time.
“Okay, Mom,” she said very softly, evenly. “Have it your way.” She started out of the room, looking back over her shoulder to add, “Just like always.”
Erika left the kitchen, then the house. She kicked off her flip-flops to feel the back yard’s grass tickle her bare feet. The day was sunny and warm, but there was plenty of shade and the breezes were cool. She settled into the hammock stretched between two trees, swayed gently, folding her hands over her stomach. Stared upward at everything and nothing.
And as had become habit, she wondered where she could go to protect herself from the hurt. She’d been wrong last week after fleeing the theater, wrong in thinking she’d always be a misfit. It was only where she was known that she could be pegged with that kind of label. It was only the people who really knew her that could trash her emotions, however unthinkingly. If only she could go someplace where she knew no one, where no one knew her. Go there and compress that dark, hated part of herself into a tiny cube until it no longer existed.
The back door opened, thumped shut. For an instant Erika hoped it was her mother and then took it back, and when she saw her brother Cal, she relaxed. With him she was safe. So far.
“What happened between you and Mom?” he asked. “She hardly noticed I was alive when I saw her in the living room.”
Erika shrugged, widening the sway of the hammock. “I don’t know what happened. It just
did.
”
“Oh. Okay.” That was all, but Erika read in the tone of his voice that he understood well enough. If not what actually transpired, then at least the root causes. And he wouldn’t press further.
Cal was barely sixteen, his prized possession a month-old driver’s license. As of late he spent interminable stretches of time in the bathroom performing mysterious rites with Clearasil and Brut and Lavoris, and his idea of a culturally stimulating experience was to hang out with his friends inside the nearest shopping mall.
But you at least accept me for what I am,
she thought. In him ran a sensitive, observant streak that might someday turn him into a very thoughtful and loving man who’d make some girl very lucky.
With a wry grin, she realized she’d never thought of him in that way before.
“Did I do something funny?” he asked, his unruly dark hair (buzzed too short on the sides, she thought) ruffling in the breeze.
“No,” she said, then tried to turn onto her elbow to face him, a move that nearly caused the hammock to pitch her into the lawn. “No, just thinking.”
He grinned. “You’re always thinking.”
Erika smiled up at him. So much she wished she could verbalize to this brother of hers who was skinny as a rail and whose long feet gave him a profile like the letter L. So much to say, to warn, to protect, to nurture…and the words wouldn’t come.
“Cal…” she said, their eyes locking.
“You want me to be careful, don’t you?”
She nodded slowly.
Cal’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously. He didn’t understand what she carted around upstairs either, but he believed in it, respected it. An open mind never hurt anybody. “Around anything in particular?”
“I don’t know.” Those silly tears wanted to leak out again, and she wouldn’t let them. “Just watch yourself. Be careful. Be…be well.”
I
sound so weird.
Cal nodded, gave her a lopsided smile. “I’ll try my best.”
They fell silent, and she heard traffic, birds, neighborhood kids, a squalling cat. “Cal, I don’t mean to be rude, but…”
“But you’ve got more thinking to do, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Okaaay,” he said, stretching, walking away. “Ole Cal knows when
he’s
not wanted.” His voice rose, passionate with mock regret. “No ma’am, don’t have to club
me
over the head twice, huh-uh. Poor unwanted Cal knows when to get gone.”
Erika laughed as he disappeared into the house, then resumed her hanging vigil. She stared up through a break in the leafy treetops, at the patch of azure sky, at the edge of a cloud that sliced across it.
She remembered Colorado from a trip with the family years ago, how the sky had been this color, only purer, if that were possible. And never before had she seen such a vast stretch of it, the first time the word
infinity
had been given tangible meaning. The thunder of a morning storm had echoed forever, rolling across mountains as if it had mass and weight, and would never die.
She’d known then that there were powers out there far far greater than her own, that could eclipse hers in a second’s time.
To go someplace like that again, where she knew no one, where no one knew her…
That’s what would make them even.
* *
Erika stayed up through the night into the wee hours. The catatonic hours, she sometimes called them when on a late date with the VCR. Her parents had gone to bed shortly after ten, and thereafter she moved into the family room for a movie or two. Cal was out with friends on this Sunday night, and she supposed she wanted to know when he came in safe and sound. Watchdogging him, sure. But wasn’t there something else?
The cryptic dream of last week had never returned…the latest in a series that always came attacking her in her sleep, like stealthy night fighters. And in its failure to return, she felt both a relief and a growing unease. Best to stay awake, then. At least she knew safety lay in that land.
One o’clock.
Support Your Local Gunfighter,
some old comedy-western with James Garner, had just ended. No Cal yet, but their parents weren’t too rough on him during the summer regarding a curfew. Lucky little twirp.
When I was sixteen, could I have gotten away with dragging in this late? Noooo.
She made popcorn to sustain her through the next movie, which ended at two-thirty, and then Channel 5 rebroadcast the night’s last local news program. One of the highlights was the cleanup following the sixth annual Veiled Prophet Fair—America’s biggest birthday party, it had become billed as—which had begun during the middle of last week and had culminated on Saturday on the Fourth of July with one of the most grandiose fireworks displays ever seen by human eyes. Over three-quarters of a million people had jammed onto the riverfront and around the Arch and at the Landing, and if you didn’t think that many hungry, thirsty, sweaty people left an epic mess in their wake, you had another thing coming.
The phone jangled at ten ’til three. She answered before it got off a second ring.
“Hi. It’s, uh, it’s me.” The voice was male and unmistakably juvenile.
“Cal?”
“Who else?”
“Okay, dweeb, what’s wrong?”
He cleared his throat, then did it again. Stalling, of course. One of her own tactics. “Ummm, I went out tonight with Jerry and Kevin and Cliff, you know, to the movies. The new Schwarzenegger movie,
Predator.
You
gotta
see this one…”
“Skip the reviews, okay? Get to the important stuff.”
“Okay, okay. Anyway, we’ve been over at Cliff’s house messing around most of the rest of the night, ’cause his parents went away for the Fourth, and, uh…you know I was the only one driving and all…and my set of keys sort of got locked in the trunk.”
Erika sighed. “I see. And how did this happen?”
Silence, though she thought she could hear muffled laughter in the background.
“Cal.”
“How’d it happen?” he repeated.
“I think I asked something like that, yes.”
“Well, they were sort of in Kevin’s pocket at the time.” More laughter in the background. Near hysterical, truth be told.
“So what you’re trying so hard not to say is that Kevin’s in the trunk
with
the keys, and you need me to come bail you delinquents out of trouble.”
He snickered. “Now you’re catching on.”
Erika grabbed a pencil and notepad by the phone. “Where does Cliff live?”
“Not too far, just west of us, in Hazelwood.” He gave her the address, some quick directions. “Uh, one more thing.”
“You’re pushing your luck as it is.”
“I know, I know. But…well, we sort of drank some of Cliff’s parents’ beer, and…could you hurry? Kevin says he
really
has to piss.” Uproarious laughter in the background.
Erika laughed in spite of herself. “Tell him to tie a knot in it and I’ll get there when I can.”