Forever (34 page)

Is he talking about Annie
?

“Bingo! Your lust for her was all it took to hand control over to me.” Eddie chortled. “And I do so love to be the man in control.”

But I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to
—

“Oh, I’ll give you credit for the struggle, Tommy. You’ve fought valiantly against me this time. But you see, it was never a fair fight. Maggie called the shots a long time ago.” Eddie cackled. “The
shots
, oh my, unintentional pun there. But we can’t really blame it
all
on Maggie, can we? It was you that followed your prick all the way to Indiana after her.” Eddie’s voice turned low and menacing. “Should have cut your losses back there in Pennsylvania, Stout.”

“I’m not Jacob,” Tom managed to shout, but like his screams in nightmares, his words sounded as murmurs in the quiet cabin.

“Oh, but you are.”

“Fuck you!” His voice was stronger that time.

Eddie laughed. “Sleep, Tom,
sleeep
. It wouldn’t do at all for you to wake up just yet.
Sleeep
.”

Tom grew numb and dumb again.

“I called to update you on our progress, Tommy. Patricia is planning a
bang-up
welcome for Julie at your house—pun intended. And Kate is no longer with us.” Eddie’s voice turned from breezy to menacing. “What do you think, Tommy—will I get to taste succulent Lindsay like I’ve planned? Can’t you picture us becoming
intimate
friends?”

Tom leaned over and vomited into the sink.

Eddie snickered and then returned to his chit-chat voice. “How’s Annie, you ask? Well, Annie is lying in a pool of blood and snot and her own vomit right now. I’d let her speak to you, but the shape she’s in, you probably couldn’t understand a word she said. She’s not much to look at anymore, but then, you’d already lost interest in her, hadn’t you?”

Tom willed himself to wake up, to stop the horror of this conversation. Stop it.
Stop. Please
.

But Eddie went on, his voice rising with excitement. “Since you were through with her, I’m sure you won’t mind me telling you that I’ve fucked her several times today—in oh so many ways. In fact, I’m sure I’ll do it again before I’m through with her. What? What was that? Why, I think she’s trying to say something, Tommy. Here, let me
help
her. I’ll hold the phone close so you can hear.”

More clearly than he’d ever heard any sound in his life, Tom heard Annie’s screams of agony. And he went on hearing them even after he’d hung up the phone and returned to the sofa. In some dark corner of his mind, he knew he would hear them forever.

* * *

Julie felt anxious the moment she stepped out of the jetway. She told herself it was just the strangeness of knowing no one would meet her in the terminal, but the feeling persisted as she made her way to the baggage claim. She stood before the carousel idly wondering why it seemed that no one ever belonged to the first twenty bags that went around. Impatient to hear a friendly voice, she dialed the number to the cabin.

“I’m here,” she said. “At the airport.”

Tom didn’t try to hide his sigh of relief. “Come straight out here.”

“But I want to stop at the house. I wanted to see Lin—”

“Lindsay’s not there. She was called into work early.”

“Well, I still have to pick up my car, and I need some clean clothes.”

“You don’t need any goddam clothes!”

“
Tom
. What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry, babe. Just don’t go to the house.
Please, don’t
.”

Julie forgot watching for her luggage. Something in Tom’s voice had shot a chill through her. “Tell me why you don’t want me to go.”

Tom hesitated only a second. “I think Patricia’s there waiting for you.”

“But . . . she wouldn’t, not after—”

“When Lindsay left for work, she saw Patricia headed toward the house.”

“Oh, my God. I don’t want to see her.”

“No, babe, and I don’t want you to. Stay at the airport. I’ll pick you up.”

Julie focused on the Hertz sign in her line of vision. “No, don’t. I’ll rent a car. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She ended the call and turned back to find her luggage. It was for the best that she’d see Tom first. He should be the first to know. Lindsay would have seen her face and prodded her with questions until she’d pried the doctor’s verdict out of her. In the secrecy of her pocket, she spread her fingers across her abdomen and silently rehearsed how she would tell Tom.

* * *

Eddie’s last attack had gone a long way toward releasing Annie. She was bleeding from too many places to count, but she pulled away from the pain. She lay on her side, facing away from him, marveling how light her dying body felt.

At times—when
he
shut up—she heard another voice rising and falling, never quite loud enough to make out the words, but the unfamiliar cadence of it comforted her. She was drifting with the rhythm of that voice, when glass shattered against the wall in front of her. Tiny prickles, like a hard sleet in January, rained down on her fully exposed skin, but she didn’t move.

With an exaggerated sigh to let her know how much trouble she was, Eddie lurched from his chair and stomped across the room. He jammed the toe of his shoe under her left cheek and rocked her head back toward him. The rest of her body remained immobile.

“Now that I have your attention,” he said as he returned to his seat, “I’ll continue. Your beloved won’t remember the phone call we made to him—not consciously, at least. But I suspect he’ll carry around the effects for a good long while. I’ve outdone—”

In the sudden silence that followed, Annie slid her eyes in his direction. His face swam in and out of focus, but she saw him clearly enough to know he was staring off into space as if in a trance.

She closed her eyes, again. Looking at him awakened the monster of pain. Her fingers roamed idly over something lying beside her. It was smooth and cool. She traced its shape. The edge sliced through her fingertips with a zing. There was weight and substance to this cold, sharp thing, and she regretted she couldn’t see it. But it would take too much effort to look, and effort was one thing she had in short supply now. Even after Eddie came out of his trance and his continued raving demanded her attention, a part of her mind considered the value of this object hidden beneath her right hand.

“Did you know our Tommy built his cabin on the edge of the woods where, all those years ago, the two of you first screwed your brains out?” Eddie asked. “And he found your pathetic memorial to Jacob where you buried it—correction—he found it where I
reburied
it. I already knew what you’d done, of course, but I had to see it with my own eyes. The rose petals were a delightful touch.
Anyway
, that’s how I located Tom; your pathetic little stone vow called to me, and I zeroed in.”

The stone, the stone, the stone echoed in her mind until she realized she could finally hear the other voice clearly. So clearly, in fact, that she opened her eyes to see the girl who was speaking. Annie recognized her instantly.

Maggie smiled shyly at her and then turned back to her work. She was kneeling on the ground before a shallow hole. A flat rock, about the width of a dinner plate, lay in her lap. When she spoke, her voice was soft and sweet, but tinged with sorrow.

“It’s gonna be dusk ’fore I tramp my tired body out of these woods to face the devil. Ain’t giving him satisfaction by shaking like a lamb to the slaughtering, though.” Maggie’s face sharpened with her determination. “Not so long past, I would have. He terrified me. Right up to the day he ripped my love from me and left me nothing but hate so fierce, so white-hot, it plumb cauterized my soul.”

She paused for a moment, looking down at the stone.

“Today, I slipped away after the washing up, but this here work took me longer than I planned. The light in these woods dies long before the sun sets.”

Annie looked up. Maggie was right; the thick canopy blocked most of the light already.

“I spect he’s been cussing me since he came back and found a dead fire in his empty cabin. Every passing minute, his anger’ll grow like the wild grape vines in these here woods, grasping at any old thing it can to support itself.

“But I ain’t worried about him searching for me. Oh, no. He’s a snake lying in wait. The later my homecoming, the longer he’ll have to sit there with his eyes all slitty, his bony fingers pulling at his grizzled whiskers and rubbing at his cruel lips, while that wormy mind of his thinks up how to punish me. Every day I feel the sting of his hand or the bite of his switch, so he’ll give me worse this time. No doubt, it’ll be more of those things he does to me in the night—unspeakable things—and I can see him now, eyes glittering with excitement for it.”

Maggie had glanced away and whispered when she said “unspeakable things.” Annie’s heart ached for her.

“Don’t matter what he does to me anymore, though. He withered the life in me not yet a month ago in these here woods.”

Maggie paused again, as though remembering that day, and then returned to her work.

“I picked this place to work a ways off the trace knowing if he ever finds out what I done here today, he’ll beat me halfway to death in his rage.”

Maggie dropped her tool and shook her hand.

“Now I give it a think, if he ever gets that close to sending me over, I pray God won’t stop him short.”

She examined her palm for a moment, then held it out to Annie. “Look at this.” With a sigh, she wiped it on her skirt. “No mistake, I did my share of work in my father’s house, and my chores in this here wilderness made my hands rough as a man’s. But they ain’t used to this here task. Worked me up some blisters. Now they’ve busted and left my fingers bleeding, but I ain’t paying no mind. A little pain and blood seems a fitting price to me.”

Maggie traced her ragged fingertips over the surface and then tipped it sideways so Annie could see the letters she’d carved.

“It ain’t too pretty, but I did the best I could. This is love’s labor.” She pointed to the freshly dug hole beside her. “See how I covered the bottom with wild roses? When I sink this stone and drop more of them petals on top it’ll look right nice.”

Annie watched her bury the stone. One clear drop, then two, fell on Maggie’s hands and Annie felt her own eyes sting at the sight of tears silently streaming down the girl’s face.

Maggie laid a hand above her left breast. “I feel a burning in my bosom like could be my heart is ripped out and lying in that hole. Someways it is.” She wiped away the tears with her fingers, leaving trails of blood and dirt across her cheeks.

Annie watched Maggie tamp the dirt with her bare feet and scrape dead leaves over the black dirt to hide where the ground had been disturbed. Then Maggie closed her eyes, rested one hand over her heart again, and whispered one word.

“Forever.” Suddenly, Maggie’s face glowed. “Oh! Oh! A breeze for the first time on this stifling day. Can you feel it?” She swayed and her laugh bubbled up. “Swirling ’round me so tender, caressing my face like . . . oh . . . oh.” She giggled as the breeze danced a loose curl against her neck. “This is Jacob’s last kiss, drying the tears on my cheeks.”

Annie’s heart wept as she watched Maggie smiling to herself. Finally, the girl gathered her things. Turning her back on that sacred spot, she whispered one last vow.

“Wait for me, my love. I will find you again.”

Annie’s heart sank when Eddie’s voice rose above Maggie’s, whisking the vision away.

“. . . tired of this game now. Let’s wrap things up. I think it’s time our Tommy Boy had a visitation, don’t you? And then we’ll all say
au revoir
, my dear.”

Annie opened her eyes and saw Eddie staring off into space again. He seemed to diminish somehow. She closed her eyes and waited.

After a long pause, Eddie spoke again, but his voice came to Annie as if from a long distance. Engrossed in the effort to end her pain, she ignored him and worked on getting a firmer grasp on the shard of glass in her right hand. Blood seeping from a dozen cuts made the glass slippery. Blood on her fingers, blood on Maggie’s, blood on the glass, blood on the stone. Did that mean something?

Although Maggie had walked away, snatches of her voice still floated through the cold mist that now surrounded the skin husk Annie would soon escape. Maggie had come to her because something needed done. Annie struggled to concentrate long enough to figure out what.

“Goddam bitch! Can’t get anything right.” Glass and wood splintered around her as, piece-by-piece, Eddie destroyed her home. She managed to raise her eyelids enough to capture the sight of the usually suave Eddie now flushed with fury, spittle flying with every syllable he screamed. “Julie . . . alive . . . Lindsay . . . gone . . .”

Other words he sputtered were lost as his speech deteriorated into a dissonance of roars and wails. She could only guess that some failure in his plan had set off this rage. Soon he would turn on her, and if all else were failing, he’d be determined to carry out his plan for her down to the last detail.

Annie drifted away.

She was driving her red Camaro down a two-lane highway, while someone—oh, it’s Kate—sat beside her, saying . . . saying . . . The mist thickened and bore her deeper into blackness, but when she floated back, she knew what Kate had said. Now, a second voice wound through the mist; Maggie saying the same, “Let him go.”

Maggie had shown her the beginning and Kate the ending. Annie was so relieved to have solved the riddle, it took her a while to realize that Eddie’s tirade had wound down. Now he was talking again . . . to Tom? And laughing? No. It couldn’t be. She was still hallucinating. As proof, she opened her eyes to see Kate lying beside her on the floor, smiling at her.

“It’s time, Sissy,” whispered Kate. “Come with me.”

Annie smiled. She closed her fist around the weapon and gave thanks for brittle glass that broke into such wicked points. By touch, she’d finally identified this freedom-giving device. It was part of a fake Venetian-glass vase Gary had given her on their first anniversary, the only thing she’d kept from their marriage. As Eddie would say, “Isn’t that just perfect?”