PANIC (13 page)

He taps it on the pad, looking right at Nick. Nick looks back at the waiter, the kid from the convenience store, the one who cocked his hips slyly looking for a ride, possibly to an overgrown field or between two truck trailers behind an abandoned warehouse loading bay.

“Yeah,” he said, clearing his throat huskily. Behind his shades he watches the kid’s face, disbelieving the coincidence.

He ordered two eggs over easy, side of bacon, hash and toast like it was the only thing on the menu. It was late enough in the morning so he ordered a Bloody Mary for Meg and grapefruit juice for himself to wash down some aspirin. He’s glad to be wearing sunglasses for his tired eyes or he’d have been instantly recognized.

“I’ll be right back with your drinks,” says the waiter, bouncing away on vintage sneakers, waving his hand over to a fellow waitress so he can whisper something discreetly about the couple at the table.

He was probably telling his gabby teenage friend he totally cruised Nick or that he’s a vicious flirt. The other waitress was round and had freckles and would definitely have the hots for him. He’d promise not to tell anyone what she’d done to him and she’d promise not to tell anyone she was seventeen if anyone asked. She’d be shy until he got her alone.

He didn’t have to worry about the waitress at the counter, older, fuller woman, single mom, tanned, probably stunning back in her party days. She looked like a champion fuck, he thought, his mind automatically tuning out his wife talking about what she wanted to do that day -

“maybe the pier shops or maybe we could look at kitchen stuff”

- he heard snatches while his radar combed the room and found a potential opening, so to speak.

His relief that his wife looked normal again faded surprisingly quickly and was replaced, as normal, by boredom. Convenience store boy had the drinks on the table quickly, just like he said, and Nick downed the pills with a chaser of the tangy, bitter juice, thinking the waitress pouring coffee at the counter would be the type to just turn the TV up loud and lock her kid’s door from the outside while they went at it through the thin walls in her room in whatever first floor apartment she was renting out in the sticks.

Meg smiled at him without a care in the world, sipping her spicy Mary through two straws, waiting for her eggs Hollandaise with thin slices of smoked salmon. She was blissfully happy, all too happy to stumble back into love with him.

E
IGHT

THEY DRIVE TO the pier on the lake, for her, and she takes him into the various knick-knack shops. She doesn’t like them any more than he does but is giddy anyway from the chance to do something, anything out on the town with her husband like two normal people. If it were up to her, they’d do more date stuff - maybe even go to a movie once in a while.

She spent some time cooing over a real teak Ottoman in the French Provincial style, mulling it over since it was less than four figures. It was in one of the fancier shops, one where every item seemed unique, where their showcase item was a mirror that cost more than most people’s cars. He didn’t feel like carrying it and after a while, she decided against it. They’d settled on ice cream at a stand near the end, where she got lemon curd, just like she always did when she was little.

They sat together on a bench, eating and talking and laughing, watching lake birds swoop down to fight over a floating log, sitting still on the lake. An older man was teaching a boy and a girl how to fish, right off the dock. The girl stood on the bait cooler because she was short.

He sat still with her, letting his pulse slow while the sun went down. He’d only had a couple of cigarettes but that was better than yanking her off somewhere like they were on the clock. The spray off the lake misted his face and when she looked at him, he looked like a model in a yachting catalog with his perfect hair and his white shorts. Her smile came freely and the retreating sun warmed her inside. If she could keep it this way forever she’d never complain again. If she could get it once a month, she’d probably settle for that too.

Her love had grown inside her even when she didn’t want it to, from back when his idea of romance was climbing all over her because he couldn’t get enough, even when she just knew he was lying about working late at the office or going away on business and she stayed up nights biting her nails down to nubs.

In the light of the sunset, he just looked vulnerable to her.

“You know, I just can’t help it.”

Nick takes her hand in his, looking directly at her, warmth he hasn’t given her since he courted her. Back when she had to be home by eleven to keep from waking her grandmother up and he picked up the check without grousing about it.

“Can’t help what?” he said.

She could see the distress on his face, a paranoid, weary look that made him seem like he found comfort in her again because she was a safe harbor. She lied to herself, realizing she’d missed his love more than she let on in the last few tense months. She squeezed his thumbs, her comely hands feeling his strength and vulnerability both.

“It’s nothing, really.”

The evening passes too quickly.

Her head rests on his shoulder, comfortably, as the car winds through the pass road

high in the mountain crossing the palisade. The road is new, so new it shimmers with dew in the morning. Trees rush past the window in parallax, pines, firs and maples, their crowns swaying slightly in the early evening breath of cool air rushing over the mountain, into the valley. Some nights, when he’s not running up a tab or checking his phone for more than one unread message, he takes the long way back home, over the mountains, just to feel that thin, pure air fill his lungs.

She doesn’t snore in the seat next to him, she never snores. He has her buckled up nice and snug and she just rests on him, pretty as a picture.

He slides the window down a crack, feeling his nostrils flute as they take in fresh air. He could stop just off the side here and enjoy the solitude a while and it wouldn’t even wake her up. He could leave the car on and the heat on and just sit on the trunk, collecting his thoughts. Instead, he just settles in and takes the winding road at forty, enjoying the sights.

It seems so faraway now, the roil of emotions he’d left in his wake. The one soothing him now was the only thing that mattered; his lovely, faithful Megan who’d taken his ride far further and much rougher than any woman was willing to. She was the only one he felt he betrayed, not just cutting her off or leading her on but making her put up with his flouting of their relationship so casually.

She was unassuming but unmistakably pretty and could’ve easily snared some man to work out her emotional revenge but he was certain she couldn’t even countenance the idea. The worst he’d felt was realizing that she just couldn’t do it, that it was probably just not part of her makeup.

This made him a coward, but if that insult to his manhood was what it would take then he’d have to take that and build on it. He only hoped this clarity would last, that something from his life would remind him why he jabbed himself into anything that would hold still. He would open his oak bar in the basement and all his friends would be there, clamoring each over the other to be drunk first.

The river loomed up like a trick of the light as the road dipped into a downward scale, a straightaway that curved pretty sharply five or six miles ahead at a natural bend down the side of the mountain. It wasn’t a hairpin, the highway was too wide for a real hairpin turn but it formed a gorgeous optical illusion: the forest, the trees, and a river, rushing between a pass intersecting the mountain roads.

N
INE

IT RAN ALONGSIDE the car, loping on all fours.

If that’s a deer, he thought, it’s really hauling it.

A red-eyed deer.

His heart stopped, watching it whip through the woods like a running horse on a filmstrip, it flickered passing behind trees and brush and bushes and ferns.

The front legs kicked and the back legs pushed, hitting the ground and lifting in a bound, keeping pace like a one deer stampede. He turned his head again and gripped the wheel, seeing the too-long ankles, seeing the fingers and toes grab the dirt and fling it away as it ran, the spindly limbs too old and fragile to move that fast, yet they did. It creaked like a rocking chair, pounding the loamy forest floor as it clambered over rocks and through the underbrush and he shot up the window so he wouldn’t have to hear it. It was no use.

Its shriveled breasts hang off its body like a cow milked dry, swinging under it as it gallops like a wild horse, like cheetah hunting through the forest after a lone warthog.

Its face looked ahead as it ran, forty miles an hour, forty two, fifty, fifty-five, never dipping behind.

It ran like it should’ve had its tongue open, its motion so powerful on it’s impossibly frail body that it might just break apart, just turn into sawdust from running so hard. It faces ahead as it runs but the head turns a degree at a time, taking its time to show itself to Nick. The face is grinning its bared-tooth smile; it’s stretched human form loping like an animal. Soon it faces him utterly, a head-on, ninety degree angle from the direction of its body.

Red light from the eyes fills the car, casting a wicked glow on Megan’s face.

Leave her alone, his mind screams, leave her alone and pay attention to me.

You have my full attention, the eyes reply, glinting like prisms, passing light throughout them from the sun shrouding behind the horizon and the moon already high in the air, its crescent like a sickle blade.

The eyes burn right into him but he keeps the car steady, trying to outrun the wood woman and break the spell but it was no use, the creature could turn cartwheels faster than he could drive. His car whines, the engine sputtering to get up to speed on the pavement tearing downhill. That’s the speed he needs, flat out down the straightaway.

T
EN

THE MEMORY WELLS inside him as he floors it, just a few years ago now. It breaks the surface, vividly and he could see it, even as he met the sphinx gaze of the animated effigy.

They met again by chance when he was just passing through town on business; it hadn’t been long enough for them to forget what the other looked like. Nick was already on his way up the ladder in the brokerage and Micah was an anesthesiologist, something insignificant. Even at that moment he was fast forwarding through the conversation, just like he had done with the rest of his flings.

Soon he had Micah down on his knees for old times’ sake, and they caught up like that, Micah choking this time, trying to hide himself. Nick didn’t even have to bother with the pretense anymore; it was as simple as that.

Maybe it was easier even, Micah hadn’t grown into a man by Nick’s reckoning, he was still that pliant boy from high school who sucked dick just to make friends, the one who looked up to him in more ways than one for guidance and approval but one who Nick never let himself be seen with lest people start questioning what he was up to.

The intervening time between the last time they saw each other and now was a gulf. Micah immediately regretted it, realizing the cruelty of the man, his careless ferocity with which he set upon someone he might have remembered as an old friend, regardless of how dubious the circumstances were. Apparently, his recollection was quite different and his memory of the previous tryst had softened over the years.

Nick held his nose shut, cruelly, while he plowed away drunkenly, oblivious to the suffering, gagging sound. He seemed to enjoy this much more this time, jaded by the permutations of selfish pleasure he’d pursued, endlessly.

I deserve this, he told himself, over and over, waiting for it to end.

I deserve this, Nick told himself, pleased if only for that moment. The kid was still a great cocksucker.

He’d taken him there and left him there in the middle of nowhere, humiliated, climbing back in his car to speed off home knowing he didn’t have to worry about Micah contacting him again. He felt satisfied if he felt anything at all. He’d tell this one to the guys at the office to approving commentary about a girl from way back in high school who had an unrequited crush on him who ran into him.

E
LEVEN

HER BELT WON’T come up and she pulls at it, fumbling with the latch. She can’t feel her hands so she has to watch them work to make sure they’re doing what her brain is telling them to do.

She thinks she’s still asleep in the warm car, head bouncing on his strong shoulder while he glides her home to carry up the stairs and take her to bed. He lays her on the bed and is gentle with her and they melt into each other.

That’s how she knows it’s a dream, the belt latch won’t budge. She’s screaming at him but he doesn’t hear her over his own voice, shouting as if in a crowded room.

“I beat you!” he hollers, over and over, eyes following the front passenger window to the back, watching something beside the road disappear behind him.

She kicks her legs, trying to loop herself through the tight seat belt but she’s stuck, pulled taut under the nylon strap.

“Nick, oh god, Nick, help!”

She screams and he sees her mouth open and her eyes pinched close but he’s watching the woman running upright, slipping behind the speeding car.

“I beat you! You can’t get me, you old bitch!”

Her husband is screaming, screaming and she doesn’t know why, his hands are locked to the wheel and the pedal is to the floor. The shift doesn’t budge, his forearm is bulging with veins and she can’t move him.

She rakes his face with her buffed fingernails, so hard two of her nails break. The slash is so sudden it doesn’t even bleed right away but she can see the welts, blood vessels bursting just under the surface of the skin. She can’t take him in a fight but she can get his attention.

He looks to her, not past her this time. Nothing on that side of the car but her. His eyebrows turn up, like question marks.

T
WELVE

TIME STOPS.

“HONEY, I’m so s-”

He looks genuine in contrition, suddenly making her realize that he is for real, that he does want to change, that she has nothing to worry about. She doesn’t have enough breath in her body to forgive him, or love him back.