Violet Eyes (6 page)

Eric finally joined her at the table, and ladled himself a healthy plate of noodles and sauce. Feral waited on the floor next to the table, panting. The dog knew there was food there, just waiting for him. His nails made faint scratching noises on the floor as he shifted back and forth, hoping that by some act of either charity or clumsiness, one of the humans would drop a gift of food his way.

Rachel had put her foot down about feeding the dog from the table on day one. “If we let him think he’s going to get stuff from the dinner table, that’s all he’ll ever do is bother us while we’re eating. We’ll put some food in his dish, once we’re sure we have enough for us,” she’d warned Eric.

Now Rachel felt her own resolve waning. She
so
wanted to hold out the string of a noodle for the pup to leap at—

The sharp digital ring of the phone suddenly broke her mutinous thought.

“Who the heck…” she muttered and pushed her chair back from the table. But when she saw the number on the caller ID, she pressed her eyes closed. She took a deep breath, forced her eyes open, and picked up the phone. But instead of putting it to her ear and saying hello, she held it out to Eric. “It’s for you,” she said. Her voice was monotone.

The boy’s face lit up as he snatched the phone from her hand, and hopped off his chair at the dinner table.

“Hi, Dad!” he chirped. You could hear the excitement in his voice, and Rachel didn’t have the heart to tell him to stay at the table. It was dinnertime, and she shouldn’t have answered the phone in the first place. So the fact that their meal was interrupted was partially her own fault. Hers…
and
Anders’s. Asshole. He knew this was too early to call. Her fork clinked hard against the plate as it stabbed through her noodles. Better to get it over with though, and not have him call back.

In the other room, she could hear Eric excitedly telling his father about Feral, and then how he had had to climb a rope tied to the rafters of the gym at school during P.E. class.

She forced herself to take a deep breath, and stared hard at her noodles.

All that mattered was the meal,
she told herself.
Anders is dead to me. He does not exist.

It was probably just the vengeful nature of her imagination, but somehow, it seemed like the spaghetti bled more with every stab of her fork.

She hated it when Anders called. He didn’t do it every day, like a decent father would, but if she could have gotten an unlisted number so he could never find them, she would have. Nevertheless, the courts said no matter how much of an asshole he was, he still had the right to talk to his son.

But moving where she’d gone, she had certainly made it a little difficult for him to see Eric. While she agreed that a boy should have the influence of a father figure in his life, she did not agree that Anders was the man to provide that influence. There could be no good impression received from that man.

Still, she couldn’t stop the boy from talking to his dad. All she hoped was that he eventually saw through his father’s bad humor to realize that the rotten jokes just offered a temporary way for the man to hide what a rotten person he actually was.

When Eric finally came back to the table, Rachel was almost done with her plate, though it was sitting heavy in her stomach.

“Your food’s getting cold,” she said, trying to hold back her anger.

“Dad bought a new truck,” Eric announced.

“Great,” Rachel said, biting her tongue. “Eat your spaghetti.”

“Actually, it’s an old truck,” Eric added. “He said it was used but that it’s really big and electric blue and he’ll give me a ride in it when he comes down.”

Rachel felt her chest constrict. “When is he coming down? Not this weekend, I hope?” she asked, just a little too fast.

“I dunno,” the boy said, twirling the cooling spaghetti noodles around his fork. “He didn’t say.”

“Okay,” she said, trying to remain calm. “Just remember, he needs to clear weekends with me. He can’t just show up here.”

Eric gave a “Yes, Mom, I’ve heard it all before a thousand times” roll of his eyes. “I know, I know,” he said.

“I’m not trying to be mean,” Rachel said. “But your father…well…he doesn’t always follow the rules. And that just makes everyone else’s life difficult. I don’t want him making our lives difficult anymore.”

Eric didn’t say anything. He stuffed a forkful of noodles in his mouth.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

He met her eyes, his own wide and blue, unblinking. His cheeks puffed out like a chipmunks. After a few seconds, he nodded.

And in that moment, Rachel felt like utter shit. Eric deserved to have a good childhood. A fun one. She’d pledged that no matter what, she wouldn’t let her problems with his father interfere with that. At least, not any more than separating and renting a house in a strange town already dictated. But here she was, throwing a mess in Eric’s lap. A mess he had no idea what to do with.

Being divorced was almost as hard as
not
being divorced, she thought.

Chapter Eight

Thursday, May 9. 7:44 p.m.

Motrin wasn’t helping. Billy lay back on his pillow and moaned. After playing catch with Eric, he’d popped a couple pills and gone straight to bed. He could hardly see straight. The good thing about living alone was that you could make pretty much as much noise as you wanted. Fart as loud as you felt like, moan whenever you rolled over, cry out some porn star’s name if you wanted when you came.

There was nobody around to hear or care.

Right now, Billy wished there was. He wished Casey’s warm breath was tickling his neck. The feel of her heavy breasts brushing against his arm and chest would not have failed to push any pain he felt into the background. When he was with Casey, there was nothing he could focus on but her. He could have stepped in a bear trap, and he wouldn’t have been able to look away from the glint in her eyes.

Now, when he thought of her, all he could picture was the blood and the ragged hole that had just a few hours before been one of her beautiful eyes.

The hole where the spiders had eaten their way inside her head.

A shooting pain hit right behind his forehead, and Billy yelled out to the room. “Fuck off, you fucking fucker!”

Eloquent. But his shout turned into a cough.

And his cough, turned into a choke.

Billy sat up in the bed, struggling to cough the problem free. His throat prickled with something that strangled his breath. His coughs turned heavier, and he could feel his reflux mechanism threatening to kick in. He was ready to puke to dislodge the problem.

“Fuckin’ sucks!” Bill choked, and rolled off the bed to stagger to the bathroom. He’d had problems with allergies before where his throat closed and the coughs came painfully hard. But this was different. This wouldn’t stop.

His breath came in ragged wheezes, and he opened his mouth again and again to gasp for air as he knelt down over the toilet. This was ridiculous. He hadn’t been eating anything, so he hadn’t swallowed wrong. He hadn’t done anything but lie in bed, praying for the headache to go away. And now for no apparent reason, it did seem to be trying to escape…through his esophagus. Something hot hit the back of his throat, and Billy closed his eyes with a disappointed “Oh shit”. Whatever he’d eaten earlier, was leaving.

He opened his mouth as the stream of acid shot forward. But something still felt wrong, even as he felt the familiar rush of puke. He hadn’t drank himself to the point of puking in a while, but he knew all the stages.

And the stages didn’t include a feeling like claws dragging at your throat as the vomit came. Something dark hit the bowl, and then in another cough, more acid slipped out. Billy didn’t try to stop it; he let it come, just wanting whatever was wrong to get out.

Spasm after spasm shook him, but as he choked up his lunch, he felt something scratching his throat. When he looked into the bowl, as the feeling finally waned, he saw spots of something bright in the dark of the toilet (What had he eaten for lunch? he wondered). Three spots of red dotted the mess he’d puked up.

He winced, and blinked tears into the bowl. Then he pulled some toilet paper and used it to wipe his eyes and mouth. The tremors in his gut seemed to have slowed, and the strange feeling in his throat had quieted too.

But when he shook his head, it felt like he was shaking a fish bowl. As if his brain were swimming in a sea of coral, swishing this way and that…and catching bits of itself on the rocks.

Billy pulled himself up, holding on to the marble of the sink, and then reached down to flush. Just as the water swirled, dark colors mixing with dots of red and chunks of not-quite-white, Billy could have sworn he saw something reach out of the water. Something small but segmented. Something purple.

His eyes widened, but it was too late.

Whatever it was, was gone.

Billy felt his gut shudder. He wasn’t sure if it was from the idea of something purple coming from inside him, or because of something he ate. He tried not to think about it, and instead plunged his face into a stream of cold water in the sink.

Then he peeled off his shirt and pants, and climbed back into his bed, this time, beneath the sheets. All he wanted to do was sleep.

Sleep and forget.

Chapter Nine

Thursday, May 9. 8:02 p.m.

Anders Sorenson hung up the phone with his son, and took a deep breath.

Then he pivoted on a dime and punched his fist into the wall. There was a satisfying give in the seemingly hard surface, and he felt flecks of paint fall from his skin as he pulled his hand back from his release. The pain was a relief from the frustration wired up around his heart. He’d punched his knuckles into plenty of hard surfaces before; more often they were jawbones instead of walls, but the point was to make the point. Anders had never taken any shit. And the fact that his wife of ten years had fucking driven the car that
he
had bought to a slimy lawyer’s office and filed paperwork that made half of
his
shit hers—only without
him
—and then hired a moving van with
his
money to come take half of his shit, including
his
son, away from his house…

Anders pulled back his arm and jabbed forward again, hard.

“You fucking cunt!” he yelled. Nobody answered. The nice thing about living in the suburbs was that if anybody heard, nobody cared. There was a good amount of yard between his house and the next, and the guy who lived next door? Anders didn’t even know the pencil dick’s name. He was thin and wore glasses and came home in a pixie boy suit. That’s all he needed to know to know. Anders didn’t need to know the guy’s name, occupation or favorite color.

Anders didn’t give a shit.

He looked at the dent in the wall, and then at his knuckles, flecked with drywall dust, and now starting to bloom in blood. The familiar sting began as the blood stippled through the broken skin.

“I should never have let you go,” he whispered. “You were
my
wife, nobody else’s. ’Til death and all that shit. We could have worked it out, if I’d have stopped you. I should have done more to stop you.”

He stared at the phone, and then at the knives in the cutting block on the kitchen counter. The knives someone had given them for a wedding gift. Someone with a death wish? Who gave knives as a
gift
?

“Eric is my kid too,” he whispered. “And I’m not going to let you keep him from me. You can drive him hours away, but I can drive just as far. And I will.”

Anders ran his knuckles under the faucet and fantasized about the look on Rachel’s face when she opened the door and saw who had just shown up on her doorstep. She would not be happy to see him. But what could she do? If Eric was right there behind her, waiting to give him a hug, she couldn’t really say no to him, could she?

If she did, who was the asshole then, right?

He grinned, and dried off his bleeding hand with a paper towel. He’d have to fix the wall this weekend. No big deal…he’d fixed worse problems before.

And then he’d worry about fixing Rachel. And he would. He worked a lot, but he could manage a drive down to Passanattee. He had a couple days on the books that he could take off if he needed to. He needed to see his son again. Not to mention that he needed to teach a certain uppity cunt a good lesson or two.

Lesson One: Nobody got the best of Anders Sorenson.

Not by a long shot.

Lesson Two: Nobody took Anders’s son away from him.

And number Three… Nobody fuckin’…see Lesson One.

Anders Sorenson nodded and looked at the calendar hanging on the wall. There was a picture of a beach bunny on top, showing some nipple peeking out from her teeny bikini. That was the only good part about Rachel being gone. Anders could watch porn in peace, and hang as many nudie posters around the house as he wanted.

The calendar still read April though it was well into May.

He lifted the calendar to the next page and fingered a date in the middle of the page. He pictured Rachel’s face the last time he saw her, looking drawn and mean in a divorce court. He knew deep down, that she wanted him back. But she was the kind of girl who’d cut off her nose to spite her face.

Well, he was not going to be bested by her. He’d said those words before in his head, but this time, he really meant it. He had come through the hard part, and it’d hurt like hell. But now…now he had a plan. Time to give some back.

The bandages only hurt a little bit when he pulled them tight across his bloody knuckles. He was working on a job site tomorrow, so he knew he needed to cover the cuts. But he wasn’t really paying attention to that. He was thinking about Rachel. Thinking about how she used to love it when he grabbed her ass really tight, and bit down with just the right amount of force on her nipples. He lifted the calendar another page, and nodded to himself.

“You’ll be in my bed again by June,” he pledged.

Chapter Ten

Friday, May 10. 6:17 a.m.