The Bad Lady (Novel) (7 page)

Rather than offer her comfort, by saying something insightful, I took a self-conscious step backwards and announced, “Can I go now?”

“No.” She shook her head stubbornly. “Not yet. Let me see your fingernails.”

“They’re clean.”

She grabbed my hand and inspected the nails. “Billy, from now on you’re to stay away from that woman. Do you understand?”

I nodded. Her furious tone scared me.

“I’m not fooling around, I‘m dead serious. Nancy Sutcliffe is not your friend. She’s a predator.”

“What’s a predator?”

“It’s someone who preys on the weak.”

“Preys?” Droplets of bathwater still dripped from my hair.

“That’s right. A predator is someone who takes advantage of people. Like you, a child, who doesn’t know any better.”

“But Nancy didn’t hurt me. I just don’t understand what we did.”

“She did to hurt you, Billy, and someday you’ll understand that.”

“Why don’t I understand it now?”

“Because you’re too young. Please. Just do as you’re told. Stay away from that woman.”

Even at that young gullible age when I knew close to nothing about the complexities of the world, I knew, without a doubt, that my mother was merely looking out for me.

“Billy, I’m not mad at you,” she assured me. “I’m mad at Nancy Sutcliffe, so don’t start crying again.”

“I’m not crying,” I fibbed.

“Yes you are. Your eyes are beet-red and there‘s tears trickling down your cheeks. I‘m not blind.”

“Mom, I thought you got along with Nancy.”

“I thought we got along too. But apparently, I made a huge error in judgment. You just stay away from her.”

“I said I will.”

PART FOUR

THE BAD LADY GETS INVOLVED

CHAPTER 9

Now I knew I should not spy on my mother, especially when I should have been asleep.

Nevertheless, I could not help but pop out of bed when, all of a sudden I heard her in her room conversing with the bad lady.

In my red & black plaid pajamas, I tiptoed down the dark hallway and as quietly as possible stopped outside my mom’s bedroom door, which was partially open, and heard:

“You can’t let something like this go left unpunished.” This was my mother speaking, except it wasn‘t. The words were coming out of her mouth, but it wasn’t she. It was the bad lady, that’s what I called this personality, who sometimes took over my mom’s mind.

“What do you want me to do?”

“What do you think?”

“I‘m not sure, that’s why I’m asking.”

“Eradicate the garbage,” the bad lady made clear, in her usual threatening tone. “That‘s what I want you to do.”

“I knew that’s what you would say.”

“That’s because that’s what must be done.”

How these conversations went down is really, really unusual. Let me see if I can explain. First of all, whenever my mom and the bad lady talked to one another, it was the same as when two physically different people engaged in conversation. Except normally, during their chats, my mother would be staring at her reflection, either in the mirror, in a pane of glass, or she might be looking at her shadow, if say she were outside and the human shadow stretched, in a clear outline, across the ground or along the wall of a building or something.

On this occasion, she gazed at her reflection in a small handheld mirror, which had a silver handle.

“What about prison?” my mother asks.

The bad lady scowled, arched her eyebrows wickedly. “Bridgette, don’t concern yourself with prison,” she advised. “Worry about God. In the end he is the final judgment.”

Bridgette was my mom’s name. With her long brown hair spilled in tatters over her face, she sat in candle light, at her wooden desk, penning her greeting cards. Or at least my mother had been writing her greeting cards before she had picked up the mirror; the notepad that she jotted her poetic verses down on lay spread out in front of her.

A stick of mango incense burned, the sweet aroma floated idly in the air. Protruding from a ceramic Smiley face mug, which was next to the notebook, were several sharpened black pencils. From the nearby stereo music played softly, a unique style of composition that you would never hear on mainstream radio. No, this music had a creepy-sounding organ, a guitar, and a spellbinding drumbeat, with mysterious people chanting unknown words in the background, which reminded me of a weird religious ceremony.

“Is what you’re telling me his will?”

“Yes,” the bad lady concurred. “The order I just gave you comes directly from the highest angel. Sin brings sorrow. Nancy Sutcliffe is an evildoer; you must do what is right in the eyes of the father.”

Suddenly, I accidentally bumped my elbow against the bedroom door, causing the hinges to creak somewhat. I got lucky though. My mom, who, at the moment, wore a black satin robe, and the bad lady were too busy with their conversation to notice. Also, I think the strange music camouflaged my noisy blunder.

The way the candlelight radiated on my mother’s face made her resemble a ghost. Her eyes looked incredibly spooky. The dim, orange candlelight also put eerie shadows on the wall and ceiling.

“I should have paid closer attention to Billy,” my mom says, shaking head her. “Maybe it’s my fault.”

“How can it be you fault?” the bad lady inquires. “Or your son’s fault?”

My mother sparked a cigarette, which she had gotten from the desk drawer. Then with quivering hands, she nervously inhaled the smoke. “I’ve been trying to raise him the best I can.”

“This has nothing to do with how you raised him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Even though the world is full of sinners,” the bad lady continued to lecture, “you can’t keep the boy locked up at home twenty-four hours a day.”

“I know. That would be impossible.”

“And when a sinner like that pedophile Nancy Sutcliffe does what she did, there is no excuse. That woman needs to pay. Now, because of her sick, twisted fetish, Billy might be scarred forever . . . So tomorrow, you take care of it.”

“I will.”

“You’d better Bridgette. Remember, it‘s the way it has to be. And if you don‘t take care of it, I will.”

I never knew what to make of it when my mom spoke to the bad lady. However, this particular conversation frightened me, I mean really frightened me. Gave me the chills deep down inside and caused goose flesh to break out all over my skin. That was one thing about the bad lady that I never understood, she always focused on punishment.

I think many of my mother’s problems stemmed from my father walking out on us. I wish I could remember him so that I had more to go on. My mom always made my Long Lost Daddy out to be a villain. I did not want to think of him that way. It seemed unfair. Yet the more time went by without him trying to reconnect, the harder it became for me not to think he must have been a jerk.

Someone once told me that if a man falls out of love with his wife, and decides that he no longer wants to live with her that man should at least remain a part of his child’s life.

That made sense to me because I did not get why my daddy would never come to visit me, or call on the phone; write me a letter, send me birthday or Christmas cards or presents, nothing. The sad thing was if I walked past him on the street, or saw him at McDonalds or somewhere, I would not even know who he was. Nope. My biological father would not know who I was either. Although I presume in his case, it would not matter. Since he did not like my mother, that most likely meant that he did not like me much either. I don’t know why. Other than being born, I never did anything to him.

Now, as I tiptoed back down the murky hallway, returning to my room, I heard my mom still talking. You might be wondering how long these discussions between her and the bad lady normally lasted. Well frankly, it was always different. Sometimes their conversations would be pretty short, only a couple of minutes, whereas other discussions might drag on for ten or fifteen minutes. It would depend on what they were talking about. If the topic was, say serious, like this one about Nancy, that’s when the chats would be longer. With the bad lady usually getting pissed off and spouting her rules.

Anyway, after carefully closing my door and turning off the light, I climbed back into bed, threw my blanket and cool white sheets over my face, yet found that I could not sleep. There were too many thoughts galloping through my brain.

As expected, I began to think about Nancy again. I did not want to be angry with her. Even though I now knew that what we had done had not only been clearly inappropriate, it had also been a serious sin against God.

Since I could not sleep, I sat up, found my tiny flashlight, and then commenced to leaf through the pages of one of my Spiderman comic books, hoping to distract myself.

Outside the window, I heard cars occasionally pass by. As well, as kids on bicycles. That happened a lot during the warm months.

There was a Seven Eleven up the road. Many teenagers that lived in town, high school kids, hung out at there at night drinking Slurpees and eating nachos with cheese, while shooting the crap, making up ridiculous stories about how many hot chicks they had supposedly been with. There wasn’t much else to do in Hampton, other than maybe go to the mall or take in a movie.

CHAPTER 10

All of a sudden, the phone rang.

“I have to get it,” I heard my mom tell the bad lady, as she quickly exited her room and headed to the kitchen. The kitchen was the only room in the house equipped with a telephone. It hung on the wall next to the refrigerator.

Curious, I again jumped up out of the bed, crept over to my door, and opened it a slight crack, to find out if I could hear who had dialed our number. For some reason I thought it might be Nancy. And the idea that it might be her triggered, within, a great deal of discomfort.

“Hello?” False alarm. What a relief. It was my mom’s boyfriend Rudy. “Yeah babe, what’s up?” My mother turned the intercom on, a habit she had gotten into a while ago so that she could mosey around the kitchen and do other things. I heard the refrigerator open and then the clatter of a plate being removed from the cupboard. I wondered if my mom planned to eat the yummy slice of Boston Crème pie that Mrs. Keller had given her.

“Sorry I had to leave tonight in such a hurry,” Rudy‘s voice came over the intercom. “I had no choice, Bridgette. Timmy is on his way to Nashville first thing in the morning.”

“What, to pick up that acoustic guitar for his weekend country band?”

“So he says.”

“Well, I hope it turns out to be the instrument he wanted. Did you get the air conditioners?”

“Yes. Just now.”

“Thank goodness,” my mother replied. “I don’t know if me and Billy could have survived another night without them. This heat is unbearable. I can’t believe, at this time of night, it‘s still in the upper eighties.”

“I know. Tell me about it. I‘m drinking another orange Gatorade as we speak.”

Timmy was Rudy’s brother. A few days before the central air in our cottage had unfortunately stopped working. It started to make a funny noise and then just conked out. My mom had tried like hell to get a repairperson over. But had been told that a technician would not be able to get to the house for at least a week. Perhaps even longer than that. Rudy‘s brother, who owned a company that sold used appliances, said, for the time being, he would let us borrow a couple of portable air conditioners that we could stick in the windows.

“Do you want me to bring them over now?” Rudy asked. “The air conditioners are in the back of my pickup truck.”

“Yeah . . . That is, if you’re not doing anything else.”

“Bridgette?”

There was long gap of unspoken words. “I‘m still here.”

“What’s the matter, you don‘t sound right?”

Based on that statement, I knew that the bad lady must have still been haunting my mom. “Sorry. It has nothing to do with you.”

“I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

“It’s Billy.”

“Your son?”

“Uh huh.”

“What about Billy?”

“There’s been a situation,” my mother explained.

“Situation?”

“Look Rudy, I really can’t talk about it on the phone.”

“Wait a minute. What is it, did something happen to him?”

“You could say that.”

“Is he okay?”

She sighed. “I just told you Rudy, I really don’t feel like talking about it on the phone. I’ll tell you what’s going on when you get here.”

“All right. I’m on my way.”

They hung up, forcing me to hurriedly shut my door and leap back into bed. The floorboards creaked, cracked, and groaned.

“Billy,” I heard my mother call my name. Darn! I knew she had heard those loose floorboards. Her authoritative voice sent my skittish body into near convulsions. “Is that you?”

I did not respond. No way did I plan to do that.

I lay on my side, clutching my covers tightly. As she approached to check on me, my mom’s thumping footsteps gathered strength. When she entered the room, she switched the ceiling light on. I pretended to be asleep. I felt her standing there staring at me. I struggled not to cough, sneeze, or scratch an anxious itch.

“Billy, are you awake?” my mother whispered. Now her feet made the floor whimper.

I remained as still as a sculpture, crossed my fingers, and hoped the bad lady would go away.

“I thought I heard you creeping around, Billy, that wasn’t you?”

Sure, it sounded like my mom, calm, cool, and friendly, but that did not mean that the bad lady had definitely went back to wherever the heck it was that she went when she wasn’t around.

“I guess I must have heard the footsteps of a spirit wandering around,” my mother joked, while leaning over my bed and then kissing me pleasantly on the cheek. “Sweet dreams, my little one.” She tucked me in and then clicked the light off. When she walked out of the room, she left the door partly open.

I lay there and waited for Rudy Knorr’s pickup truck to arrive. I did not need to be Einstein to know that my mom was planning to tell her boyfriend how Nancy had taken advantage of me. If you want to know the truth, that did not sit right with me.