Trying the Knot (37 page)

Altogether unsure what to think, Thad backed
up the stairs in complete shock.

Chelsea stumbled groggily out of bed and
wound her way through the dark kitchen until she reached the door,
where a late night visitor was knocking furiously. She had only
momentarily drifted soundly asleep, after spending an exorbitant
amount of time wondering whether or not her mother and Benjamin
Dooley were lovers. Every observation drew her to that conclusion.
Why else would they have been caught alone together in the walk-in
cooler looking out of breath and guilty with desire? Moreover, at
the hospital, when she confronted him with her suspicions, he
pulled away and insisted they leave,

Chelsea knew better than to question her
mother with her speculations because Ginny would merely emit easy
laughter and dodge the question with a lazy wave of her hand. Since
Chelsea had been away at college for the past five years, she no
longer had the ability to monitor her mother’s behavior as closely
as she had while back in high school. She wondered what her mother
could be thinking – taking a lover who was young enough to be her
own son; after all, Ginny already had one boyfriend her own age,
the town mortician.

Cautiously approaching the front door,
Chelsea wiped the sleepy gunk from her eyes and tied her hair back
with a navy night sash. She looked virgin pure, wearing nothing but
a linen nightshirt. Sleep never failed to transport her to a
peaceful uncorrupted state of bliss. In the midst of slumber, her
every obsessive thought dissolved and dissipated. While away, she
had often slept for marathon stretches in her dorm rooms dreaming
of her safe harbor on Lake Huron. Lately, Portnorth seemed neither
protected nor without its share of trouble. But it had more to do
with the abundance of problem-plagued people littering her life.
She would not venture to guess what catastrophe stood knocking at
the entrance to the floral haven of her mother’s home.

She opened the front door to find Nick
sitting distressed on the steps of the porch. From beyond the
locked screen, a gush of warm humid air rushed past her bare legs.
A damp earthy aroma saturated her grateful lungs as she waited for
him to notice her presence. As he rose to his feet and faced her,
he looked weighted with agitation and worry.

Nick rested his hand on the door handle and
stammered, “I-I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have come here unless I were
desperate.”

Chelsea backed away and demanded, “What do
you want?”

“You got your wish,” Nick said. “Kate found
out about Vange and I.”

“You don’t say, that’s nice.”

He ignored her sarcasm. “Have you talked to
her at all? I’ve been looking everywhere she could be for hours. I
thought maybe you might know where she is.”

Annoyed but oddly satisfied, Chelsea asked,
“Did Thad tell her? Even after I let him know outside the hospital
I didn’t think it was such a good idea to say something?”

“No, I told her.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that for one
second.”

“She overheard me confronting him. What
difference does it make? She knows now.” Nick backed off the steps
and stood on the pavers leading to the road. “She’s upset, and I’m
trying to find her. I’m sorry to inconvenience you!”

Chelsea eyed him moving dejectedly across the
lawn, and she was reminded of the horrible Christmas Eve years back
– when she watched from her bedroom window as Nick, Thad, and Ben
bashed her snowman to pieces in the front yard. Later that same
evening, she let Nick in through her bedroom window, like a
half-frozen Romeo, and he forced himself on her.

December, 1985

As they approached, their distant singing
awoke her in the dead of the night, and their warbling battle cries
aroused her sleepy curiosity. She had knelt on the bed and watched
as they drunkenly stumbled over snow piles, armed with baseball
bats. The trio daringly confronted the snowman she and her father
had painstakingly built during one of his rare visits. It was yet
another age inappropriate, pathetic attempt at father-daughter
bonding, but Chelsea figured if he summoned enough of a sense of
duty to want to build a snowman, she might as well not let her
seventeen-year-old cynicism get in the way. Besides, who was she to
discourage his momentary lapse into paternal nurturing?

As Chelsea held back the curtains and opened
the second story window, a gust of icy wind ripped through her old
baseball shirt, and their awful singing filled her ears. She
perversely imagined her daddy’s precious Frosty, with his coal
eyes, wool scarf, bowler hat, and carrot nose was their supreme
conquest of the evening. He had to be destroyed at all costs.

The outdoor lights blinked and cast a
majestic glow on the ice sculpture, which sat directly in front of
the living room picture window. The bat-wielding rogues gathered
around the frozen beast, which stood indifferent to its impending
demise. Definitely not holy wise men, the trio more resembled sorry
looking arctic shepherds. The gifts they carried were Louisville
Sluggers. Even in the frigid darkness, she could see they shook
with anticipatory trepidation for the air was electric with their
teen fueled testosterone, and she could see their breaths hot with
excitement.

A couple months prior, both Ben and Nick had
awoken Chelsea in the middle of the night to tell her they were
both madly in love with her. She and Nick had been seeing one
another secretly ever since, but she made him promise to keep their
romance on the down low because he and Kate had recently broken up
for the umpteenth time. Although Chelsea wished to spare Kate’s
feelings, Nick seemed intent on mauling her in front of his
ex-girlfriend and her best friend at lunch. His logic escaped her,
as did Kate’s feelings of betrayal.

From the bedroom window, Chelsea watched Thad
standing off to one side. Lame dreariness seeped from his pores as
he slowly counted away the eternal seconds. For some unknown
reason, battering Frosty to bits did not hold the same appeal for
him as it did for Nick and Ben. Chelsea thought perhaps he was too
drunk, or too sober, or too lacking in testicular fortitude. The
blinking Christmas lights made his eyes cross dizzily, and he
jammed his hands in his pockets with his bat hanging limply to one
side.

Nick, on the other hand, stood fully erect,
and his unflinching eyes teemed with perverse Neanderthal glee as
they reflected the gleam of the flashing lights. With each crushing
blow delivered to the snowman, beads of perspiration soared off his
forehead, and Chelsea imagined the sweat pouring down his muscular
chest and thighs. She shivered as he hammered away at her father’s
creation.

Like a blast from the local quarry, Nick’s
pent-up schoolboy aggression and frustrated sexual energy were an
explosive mix. Chelsea’s hand slipped beneath her ratty nightshirt.
After dabbing them with creamy wetness, her fingers made tiny
spirals around her hard nipples. The chilly night air and her own
probing hand sent shivers down her spine.

Nick pushed Ben out of his way for more
swinging room, but Frosty’s frozen head would not budge. The
illuminated snowman stood tall and defiant despite Nick’s fervent
efforts to reduce it to mush. Nick was the most intelligent person
Chelsea knew apart from herself, but he was also the laziest. She
imagined his Epicurean desires amounted to becoming a man of the
world; to drink lots of beer, travel lots of places, and make love
to lots of girls, and yet make a small difference before croaking
as an old man with no regrets. With every blow, he beat back all
the inferior nobodies defacing his existence, and perhaps he even
reserved a few blows to beat back the little nobody who dwelt deep
within himself.

Without warning, the porch light flickered
on, and a bright glow instantaneously saturated the dimly blinking
Christmas lights. Wearing a fuzzy bathrobe and carrying a shotgun,
Ginny Norris stormed out the front door.

“You mother fuckers,” she screamed out into
the darkness of night.

Just then, Frosty’s mutilated head gave way
and rolled off with muffled plop. From fright Nick’s grasp on the
bat loosened and the Louisville Slugger soared from his sweaty
grip. The bat crashed through the picture window and landed in the
middle of Ginny’s delicately decorated front room. The explosion of
shattering glass was nearly as deafening as the subsequent
terrified screech and proceeding gunshot.

Chelsea scurried off her bed and ran through
the house with her ears ringing. As she joined her mother on the
porch, all the lights in the entire neighborhood switched on. The
empty street looked as if suddenly blessed by the star of
Bethlehem. Ginny Norris scampered off the porch, tripped on
slippery steps, and fell backwards on the ice. Sprawled on the
slick walkway, she waved the imposing-looking weapon, which had
pummeled their eardrums with an excruciating bang.

Waving her smoking gun animatedly, Ms. Norris
yelled, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Thad fell to his knees and vomited a
half-gallon of black Russians into the pristine snow. Ben winced,
and a wet spot emerged in the middle of his jeans. Prepared to
watch them all die one by one, Chelsea remained frozen on the
porch. It was Nick who finally helped Ginny to her feet, and, in
his all-American Boy Scout fashion, he dislodged the gun from her
clenched fingers. Calm and collected, he coaxed their way into the
house, where they drank hot cocoa spiked with Bailey’s Irish Cream.
After patching the window with garbage bags and duct tape, Nick
promised the vandals would pay for the damage and perform
reconstructive surgery on Frosty in the morning.

Later, after dropping off his cohorts in
crime, Nick returned to the sight of the carnage and climbed
through Chelsea’s bedroom window. They kissed and made out until he
became insistent they go all the way. Chelsea wrestled her way out
from under him and walloped him alongside the head with her
complete works of Shakespeare. When he finally passed out, she left
him alone to sleep on the floor, only to be awoken hours later as
he bore down on top of her. Taken by surprise, she was too drunk
with sleep to resist him physically and let him have his way with
her.

Evangelica was the only person Chelsea ever
told about how she lost her virginity on Christmas Eve of her
senior year of high school. Vange laughed mirthlessly at Chelsea,
who asked if it were possible that Nick had date raped her and
whether or not she should tell Kate. Ignorantly, Vange informed
that if he did not orgasm it was not actually rape, and even more
ignorantly Chelsea believed her. After all what did they know, they
were just teenagers playing grown up games. Without any regard to
her feelings, Vange haughtily informed Chelsea that letting him
through the window had made it consensual, or else she was a cock
tease. Vange told Chelsea she practically had sex with Nick earlier
the same evening at a holiday party and she could care less if Kate
ever found out.

Nick never called her throughout the duration
of the winter break, and a few months after school started back up,
he resumed his faithless spot alongside his ex-girlfriend.

Chelsea stepped from the safety of her
mother’s living room and found herself outside. Wondering what
exactly was expected of her, she called out his name, and Nick
halted in the middle of the lawn. With his hands stuffed in his
pockets and his head held high, he mustered as much dignity as any
sopping wet person could project. His stance was uncompromising as
he patiently awaited her gleeful response to his own private
hell.

“Nick, wait!”

“So you can gloat?”

“No, asshole, so I can help you look for
her.” Chelsea explained, “As a favor to Kate. I don’t want to spend
a sleepless night wondering if she’s safe or not.”

Nick remained standing alongside the curb,
and Chelsea retreated in the house. A few moments later, she pulled
up alongside him in her old Malibu and opened the passenger door.
Nick slipped silently beside her, and he noticed she now wore track
pants, but she was still braless under her linen nightshirt.

Taking the dry University of Michigan T-shirt
she held out for him, he thanked her. Removing his soaked jacket
and wet chambray shirt, he noticed luggage and boxes filled the
backseat, “Going on vacation?”

“Something like that.”

“I really do appreciate this.”

“Don’t. I’m not doing it for you.”

“Regardless,” Nick said, naked from the waist
up. His hairless chest was not as defined as she remembered, but
then again everything she had once known for sure was now blurred
around the edges. Everybody and everything had gone to seed. “I
don’t know what I’d be doing right now if it weren’t for you.”

Full of hostile animosity, Chelsea demanded,
“Don’t you ever get sick and tired of telling people exactly what
you think they want to hear?”

“What?”

“Do you have to be everyone’s best friend at
all times?”

“What’s your problem now?” Nick snapped
defensively. “I was merely thanking you.”

“Make me barf, don’t feel obligated.”

“You think I have an ulterior motive? My
intentions were honorable, believe me.”

“I wonder, at the bottom of all your good
intentions, do you even have a personality at all?” she asked,
shaking her head. “It’s so fake.”

“At least people don’t find me fake and
abrasive,” he said to the window, scanning the streets.

The car stopped under Portnorth’s one traffic
light at the intersection next to the newspaper building. “You
pitiful bastard, if Kate has any sense at all, she’ll leave you at
the altar.”

“I’d never agreed to this if I’d known you
were going to be a total bitch about it,” Nick said as he pulled on
the dry, too tight T-shirt. “Let’s hurry up and find Kate, so I
don’t have to sit here and suffer through any more of your
sanctimonious bullshit.”