Genrewonk

November 2, 2011

Sunday, October 24, 12:03 AM

Chuck Wilson’s first conscious thoughts weren’t his own.

«fucking doctor should be here by now.  fuck they want me to bleed to death? fuck.»

«“It’ll be all right honey god let her be all right The doctor will give you something to make it all better is it strep, please don’t let it be strep Shh, Mommy’s here can a baby die from strep?”»

«should have known better than come here on a sunday night.  too many people.»

The thoughts were accompanied by a fractured view of a crowded waiting room.  The scene came from a dozen different viewpoints, some overlapping, none lasting long enough to make any sense of.  There was a black woman holding a squealing baby as if it was a life preserver.  There was a scruffy‑looking man in an army jacket holding a bloody bandanna to his thigh.  A dozen others, all of whom tried to grab space in Chuck’s semi‑conscious mind.

«when are they going to get to me?  i think my arm’s broke.»

«so much easier when they’re a minor.  just lean on the parents a little. feelings of fatigue.  fingers come to rub eyes. a glance down at the papers in his lap.»

What the fuck? was Chuck Wilson’s first lucid thought that he could call his own.  He could feel the contact slipping, even as Chuck realized that on that paper was the name Charles W. Wilson.  For the first time in a long while, Chuck tried to hold onto the voices in his head.

«should have been here a year earlier.  no question the mother wants to be rid of him. another glance downward.  glimpse of a tie graced by a gold bald eagle.  papers in lap with chuck’s picture on them.  dates, ages, police record. shouldn’t have used him to bait the girl.  now we got all this hospital red tape. glance up at a clock on the wall of the waiting room.  clock reads 12:09. yeah, a year early, before the asshole turned eighteen.  mom would’ve caved in five minutes, an then nobody would miss the creep. glance down at the papers. especially the euclid heights police.»

Chuck Wilson was fully awake now.  He was dimly aware straps holding him down on some sort of table.

«a tap on the shoulder.  right hand experiences an almost subliminal jerk toward left armpit.  awareness of pressure of holster, and of the dozen civilians.  surprise over in an instant, hand doesn’t move.  turn to look over. sandy haired kid with a black cartoon T‑shirt.  “What is it Elroy? don’t like that look of his.  never did.  what the hell does the kid really see?”  the kid looks up and says, “Charlie’s awake, I can feel him here—”»

Chuck’s eyes snapped open and he lost contact.  Shit boy, you in trouble.

The voices in his head might mean he was nuts, but some hard experiences made him trust them.  Hell, if the voices weren’t right all the time they wouldn’t have fucked up his life so much.  Chuck tried to sit up, and found that he really was strapped down.

“Fuck,” he whispered.

The stellar medical staff of wherever‑the‑hell‑he‑was had parked him on a rolling stretcher off in a corridor somewhere.  A chart lay on his stomach, and was slowly sliding off, knocked askew by his attempt to sit up.

He was held fast by thick leather straps across his chest and arms just above the elbow, by large cuffs on his wrists and ankles, and another belt across his legs just above the knee.  None was tight enough to be painful, but any real movement was impossible.

God, why didn’t they just get a straitjacket and get it over with?

Chuck had been questioning his sanity for so long that there was little doubt in his mind that they were bottling him up for the nut factory.  That was probably what the man with the eagle on his tie was all about.  Either that or he was some sort of cop.  Either way, Chuck didn’t want to deal with the man.  But, strapped down here, he didn’t have much choice.

The chart kept sliding until it fell into the crook of his arm.

“What the fuck I’m going to do?” Chuck muttered.  He tossed his head around, to get an idea of where he was.  It didn’t help much.  He was in an empty corridor flooded with florescent light.  The corridor was a short one ending with a T‑intersection at each end.  All the doors around him were closed, no signs of any doctors, nurses, or anyone else.

He suspected he was close to the emergency room.

Midnight? I’ve been here twelve hours?

At least they hadn’t taken his clothes, such as they were.  His jeans were splattered with blood, and the sleeves of his shirt had been slit up to the shoulder.  A bag suspended over him was dripping into a needle in his left arm, and his right hand was swathed in bandages.

Fuck that bitch, this is all her fault.

Chuck froze as he saw a uniformed cop cross past the intersection in front of him.  He didn’t breathe until the cop had passed.  Then he had to catch his breath again as a barely audible conversation started up around the corner.

“Hey, Doc, how’s the patient?”

“Fine, still sleeping,” said a mumbled voice.

“Any more word from those feds?”

A grunt.

“Yeah, I know.  Never heard of the ASI either. I’m just here to take a statement from the kid.”

Chuck’s eyes finally focused on the chair by the foot of his stretcher.  It was surrounded by a half‑dozen paper cups, and hanging off of the chair’s arm was a cop’s hat.

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October 31, 2011

Saturday, October 23, Continued

Elroy stood next to a gray van parked about a block from the main Euclid Heights Library. He watched intently as an ambulance pulled up to the front of the building to retrieve the injured Charlie Wilson.

There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about Elroy. He appeared like a typical twelve-year old boy. His sandy red hair was cut into unkempt bangs. He wore jeans and a black T‑shirt with Marvin the Martian on it.  He carried an iPhone shoved half in one pocket, and a small Bluetooth earpiece.

Despite his mundane appearance, the people who passed him on the street and met his gaze would quickly look away, as if they saw something disturbing in his eyes. Elroy barely noticed, he was long used to that reaction. Besides, there were more interesting things to spend his attention on. Like the swirls of color around Charlie as the medics wheeled him to the ambulance.

Elroy spoke quietly to himself, mouth next to the bulge in the cord to his headphones. “Why didn’t we follow the girl, Mr. Jackson?”  The boy’s voice was a barely audible whisper. The mic still picked up his voice, it earpiece was a bit more sensitive than the standard cellular headset, and it routed his question to a special app on the iPhone that routed the call through an encrypted data channel rather than the standard cell network.

“Our instructions are to monitor and take in Mr. Wilson, Elroy.” The voice in the headset was slightly distorted by the software. Elroy thought the app made everyone sound like Darth Vader.

“But she’s loads better than Charlie.”

The doors to the ambulance closed and the voice on his headphones told Elroy, “Come back to the van, we’re following him to the hospital.”

“Loads better,” Elroy repeated.

“We have time.  You got a good look at her, right?”

“Uh‑huh.”

“Then get in the van.  You can look through yearbooks for her while we’re at the hospital.”

Elroy turned around and the sliding door in the side of the van opened for him.  Inside was a bank of surveillance equipment and a balding, gray‑haired man who wore a bald eagle clip on his tie.

The door slid shut, and after allowing the ambulance a respectable lead, the van pulled out and followed.

Saturday, October 23 07:55 PM

Allison kept thinking about the overheard telephone conversation as she sat down with Mom for dinner.  The questions kept gnawing at her, and Allison kept trying to think of a way to broach the subject without admitting she’d been eavesdropping.

They were halfway through dinner, and a comparably long uncomfortable silence, before Allison got up the nerve to ask, “How come you never talk about Dad?”

Mom’s fork screeched on the plate.  The sound startled Rhett, who dashed out from under the table and up the stairs.  “Why do you ask?”  Mom looked away from Allison, her distress was lined in her face.  It wasn’t just the overwork that Mom always complained about. She looked worried.

She looked old.

“You don’t talk about him.  About why you left, or what he was like. . .”

Mom nodded slowly, still looking away.  The light carved out harsh shadows on her cheeks, and her eyes were too shiny.  “I’m sorry.  Maybe I haven’t been fair to you.  But—” Her eyes closed.  “It’s hard for me.”

Seeing Mom like upset Allison. She tried to keep the distress out of her own voice.  “I’d just like to know what he was like.”

“He was stubborn.  He was persistent. . .”  Mom’s voice lowered until it was barely audible.  “He was better than I gave him credit for.”

“Mom, why. . .”  Allison’s voice trailed off.  Mom was on the verge of tears and she was about to hit her with something like “Why did you say he was dead?” or “Why are you hiding things from me?” But Allison couldn’t do it.

Mom stood up and grabbed the plates.  Allison could see her hands shaking.  “I loved him,” she whispered.  She was talking more through Allison than to her.  She hurried to the kitchen with the plates, and Allison could barely make out the rest of her words, “. . .but I loved you more, Allie.”  The sentence ended with a near-sob.

Mom.

Allison could feel her own eyes burning with the start of her own tears.  After a moment she got up from the table and walked to the kitchen door.  Mom leaned on the edge of the sink, staring down, her body shaking with crying too soft to hear.

“I’m sorry,” Allison said.  She stood in the doorway, paralyzed, unsure of what to do.

Mom shook her head and did a shallow imitation of laughter.  “I’m just a bit tired, Allie.  I’m overreacting.”

Are you?  What was that call about? The question went unasked.

“Mom I heard—”

The phone rang.  Mom seemed almost to wince as Allison reached for it and picked it up.

“Hi. Allie?” It was Macy.

“Uh Huh?”

“Me Ben and David are going to the Cinemark to see a movie. Can we swing by and pick you up?”

“Uh— I really got to work on that history paper—”

“I know, David been talking about your ‘research’ at the library—”

“Talk to you later.”

“Wait a minute, girl.  You got to tell me—”

“Bye.”

Allison hung up the phone.  She looked at Mom who still seemed to be tensing from the phone call.  “It was Macy,” Allison said.  “The guys wanted to take me to a movie.”

“Maybe you should get going on that paper, huh?”  She gave Allison a weak smile, wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, and started running water in the sink.

“But. . .”

Allison felt as stressed out as Mom looked.  Not now.  She would wait until they both were a little calmer.

She sighed and climbed the stairs back to her room.

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October 21, 2011

Saturday, October 23, Continued

Chuck froze for a few long seconds before he registered what had happened.  He had actually gotten to apologizing to the bitch, and he had never apologized to anyone in his fucking life—

And, goddamn it all, it wasn’t enough.

He stood at the top of the library stairs, looking at her, thinking he might actually get to talk to her at least.  And, suddenly, she yanked the notebook out of his hand.

The notebook tore out of his grasp as if it was welded to the back of an accelerating semi.  It was so fast that he barely felt the spiral binding catch in the meat of his hand.  It left a thin, ragged gash across his palm.The shock of it immobilized him.

A piece of the notebook’s red cover floated to the ground.

Chuck looked up from his hand.

“Hell yes, there are hard feelings,” she said.  Then she turned her back on him and walked away.

Little miss perfect said “Hell,” Chuck managed to think.  “Hey—” he began to say.

Then he felt his hand.

“Oh shit!”  Awareness of the injury slammed into him like an out‑of‑control bus.  The pain vibrated his arm and he had to grab his wrist with his other hand to stop the shaking.  In the brief time he had looked away from the wound, his hand had pooled with enough blood to spill through his fingers and splatter on the ground.

Chuck staggered back from the sight, slamming backwards through the doors to the library.  The pain was triggering a headache, a bad one.  As bad as the pain in his hand.  Rainbow auras wrapped around the library’s fluorescent lights, and sounds rang with reverberating echoes that shook apart the back of his skull.

Blood from his hand was going everywhere; his arm, pants, the floor of the library.

“The bitch cut me!”  He yelled.  “The bitch cut my fucking hand!”

Dozens of people were surrounding him, yelling, talking. . .

Thinking.

One of the interns at the checkout desk said, “Oh god!  Diane, call 911 «view of himself from across the checkout desk, mental voice, please, jesus let him be all right.  our father who art in»”

An old librarian held back a tide of children off in the kid’s section.  “No, everyone back.  «view from inside the kid’s section.  frantic glances behind at twenty or so storytime kids.  six to eight years old.  storytime forgotten.  don’t let the children see this.  that boy has got to be on drugs.  what are their parents going to think?»”

“Oh gross. «view from behind the skirts of the librarian worried about parents.  old lady smell and eyes are close to the ground.  everything seems much too large.  hallucinogenicly large.  man’s hurt.  that real blood.  will they let us see the am‑blance.  iwanna see.  maybe he’s in a gang.  police too?  iwanna see police too»”

People began running toward him.  Chuck felt almost fully disconnected from his body now.  Prismatic colors washed out his vision when he was seeing through his own eyes, and his own ears were hearing voices as if he was in the bottom of a well.  His throbbing hand was distant, like his own heartbeat, and he was only dimly away of the fact he was on his knees cradling it.  A pool of blood had formed below him.

A man in a suit ran up to him.  He was the first to reach him.  He tore off his tie.  «blood, oh fuck.  too much blood.  its it venous or arterial— oh damn.  just get pressure on the thing.  where is that damn ambulance.  hope this kid ain’t doped on anything.  should have stuck with med school.  forgotten everything by now.  no too tight.  stop the bleeding, not lose the hand.  god his color sucks.  how much has he lost?  where’re the fucking paramedics?»  The man’s tie clamped on to his hand with a fiery grip.

Chuck realized that he was yelling at everyone.

“Get out of my fucking head!”

«gee, that’s chuck wilson.  oh wait till I tell kelly about»

«that guy is hopped to the gills.  probably did it to himself»

«i hate blood»

«where’s the fucking ambulance»

«and deliver us from evil»

Chuck rocked back and forth on his knees, looking at the crowd around him.  None of them really gave a shit about him.  He was just some sort of goddamned spectacle.  He felt his vision giving out, turning dim at the edges.  As he swayed, he saw David Greenbaum at the top of the stairs at the end of the lobby.

«allie did that?»

“Damn straight she did, you fucking geek.”

Chuck fell over, losing consciousness.

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October 20, 2011

Saturday, October 23, Continued

Allison wanted to run away as fast as she could.  Instead, she found herself walking back toward the library steps.  The walk was endless.  Chuck made no move to meet her halfway.  He stood at the top of the steps waving her notebook as if using a treat to entice a trained animal to do a trick.

Allison loathed herself as she climbed the stairs.  She loathed herself for being so afraid, and for being so blatantly manipulated despite her fear.

She reached the top step and grabbed the notebook.  She forced herself to say, “Thank you.”

“No prob, sweetcakes.  Anytime.”  He didn’t let go of the book. “I wanted to apologize for the costume party.”

“Don’t bother,” Allison said.

Her head was flaring now, the pain distorting her vision.  Her view was fracturing and wrapping itself around the notebook.

Please, not a bad one, not here.  Not now.

She pulled frantically, but Chuck was a lot stronger than she was.  Macy might have been able to pull the book away, but Allison couldn’t do more than tug futilely.

“No, really.  Too many beers and I don’t know what I’m doing.  No hard feelings?”

You’ve got to be kidding? Allison thought.A blood‑red haze gripped her head like a punch‑press linked to her pulse.  As if that drunken grope was accidental?

She realized the only way she’d get her notebook back was to accept this creep’s apology.

No!

The pain hit some sort of breaking point, lancing through her skull and vanishing.

As it did, she tried one last heroic tug.

To her surprise, with a tearing sound, the notebook actually came free.  Chuck’s smile evaporated into a look of shocked surprise.  He stared at his hand.

His hand now had a narrow red cut, diagonally across the palm, where the wire of the spiraled binding had caught.  The spiral wire had unwound for two inches and now bobbed out the top of the notebook like an antenna.  As Allison watched, a piece of the notebook’s red cover, the exact size and shape of Chuck’s thumb, drifted gently to the ground.

“Hell yes, there are hard feelings,” Allison said.  She turned and walked away, trying her best not to run.

After half a block she passed the van that had almost hit her.  The young kid in the passenger window still stared at her.  She ignored the kid and the van as she walked back past the High School.

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October 19, 2011

Saturday, October 23, Continued

In the bathroom, Allison blew her nose into a wad of coarse toilet paper.  Then she tried to reclaim some of her face from the ravages of her emotions.  She wished she was more into makeup right now.  If she had some with her she could cover some of the effects of her near-sleepless night.  But all the makeup she had in the world was in the top left drawer of her bureau.  It amounted to some eye shadow and two tubes of lipstick;  one tube to go with each of her really good dresses.

When she thought about it, the natural look was better.  If she wore mascara she’d look like a raccoon right now.

What she did look like was a rather plain-looking blonde who’d spent too much time watching the late movie.  She stepped back and forced a smile that didn’t look too hideous. At least her hair made up for her face.  It was full and fell to just beyond her shoulder-blades.  The hair was what kept her from looking like a clone of Marsha Brady.

When she left the bathroom and turned to descend the stairs, she froze.

The main stairs descended in a marble sweep toward the main entrance.  The entrance fronted a lobby, all glass and pillars.  Ahead were the doors outside. To the right was the main adult fiction area. To the left was the children’s room.

Right in front of her, standing in the lobby next to the checkout desk, was Chuck Wilson.

The sight of him, here, crushed her insides into jelly.  She couldn’t move, and all she could think was the phrase, don’t see me, don’t see me, don’t see me. . .

Her temples began to throb with her pulse.

Chuck looked around the lobby, seeming out of place in the library.  His head turned in her direction and Allison felt her heart shrivel in her chest.  But Chuck’s head kept moving until— seeming to find what he was looking for— he stepped out of her view into the adult area.

Allison made a mad dash for the front door.  She stopped only when she saw the white sentries of the anti-theft detectors flanking the exit.  She was carrying books in her backpack that she’d wanted to check out.

She backed to the checkout desk, yanking the books out of her bag and fumbling out her library card, wishing the whole process would hurry.

As they ran the books over the de-magnetizer, Allison looked around nervously.  Chuck stood there, right in the center of the magazine section, staring right at her.

Allison wanted to collapse.

She could barely take her eyes away from him as she scooped up her books.  She shoved her books into her bag and dashed for the exit, not bothering to zip the bag closed.

She made it to the sidewalk and started to cross the street, but it was against the light and a blaring horn made her jump back just in time to avoid being hit by a van. In the passenger window a twelve or thirteen-year-old boy with sandy hair pressed his face to the glass, seeming to stare right at her.

Then the van was across the intersection and Allison stumbled back onto the sidewalk.  She turned away from the street and the library and began walking away, fast.

She had hardly gotten half a block before she heard a terrifyingly familiar voice say, “Allison!  Allison Boyle!”

She turned, slowly, as if she was in a dream.

Chuck was there, on the top steps of the library, looking down at her.  He was tall and thin, graced with unruly black hair.  There was too much shadow on his face for a eighteen-year-old.  He wore the same type of clothes he wore at the costume party— wide belt, jeans, boots, flannel shirt rolled to the elbows.  The cold didn’t seem to bother him.  In his right hand he held up a red-covered spiral-bound notebook that Allison recognized.

The sight of it made the walls of her stomach fall away, leaving an empty void.

It was her Trigonometry notebook.  The same notebook she’d written Mom’s conversation down in.

“You dropped this.”  Chuck called down to her, smiling.

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October 15, 2011

Saturday, October 23, continued

“What other possibility?” Allison whispered at her notebook. The words came out with an unenlightening puff of fog.

She jotted down what else she remembered him saying before Mom hung up. Always been a chance. They already have one class in the area.

“Is that right?”

She stared at the words. She knew he’d said something about a class. It wasn’t “one class.”

She crossed out “one class” and wrote out “class one.”

John: “They already have one class a class one in the area. If they find out she’s a. . .”

“If they find out I’m a what? Then what?” Allison sighed. “Thanks, Mom.”

She underlined “they” again, and finished the last two lines so they read:

John: “They already have one class a class one in the area. If they find out she’s a. . .”

Mom: “Leave us alone.  I don’t believe any of this.  They’re stone insane.  You’re insane.  Call and I drag you into court.  Touch my daughter and I’ll kill you.”

Allison wondered about the third sentence.  The phrase “stone insane” sounded more like her romance heroine, Melissa, than it did Mom.  However, Allison was certain that her mother had said “stone insane” or words to that effect.

Allison sighed.

Would someone please tell me who “they” are?

She decided she’d killed enough time and packed up her backpack again.  Whatever was going on in her family’s life, she doubted it would be an adequate excuse for Mr. Counter.  She still had to flesh out that bibliography.

She checked her watch and saw that it was past nine.  Good, the library was open.  She crossed the street and resumed her journey.

At the library, she spent the morning roaming the stacks. By noon she had amassed an impressive bibliography for her paper.  She’d scanned books on revolution, American, French, and otherwise, and had found herself involved despite herself.  One of the books had a distinctly Marxist flavor to it that she knew would absolutely infuriate Mr. Counter if she included it as a reference.

She sat behind a desk piled with books and told herself that she was finally done. All she had to do now was type up the bibliography and slip in a few of the supporting quotes that she had picked through while leafing through her horde.

Her sense of victory was muted.

She wished she’d never listened in on that phone call.  It wasn’t as if she didn’t have enough on her mind already.  She pulled the notebook out of her backpack and looked at the transcribed conversation again.

She wished she’d had the sense to write the thing down when it was fresh on her mind.  She knew the conversation had eroded in her memory. The gaps in it might contain something important.  Something that would explain everything.

You could ask her.  Confront Mom directly. . .

Allison sniffed and realized her eyes were watering.  She sucked in a shuddering breath and wiped her face with the back of her hand.  A small damp spot now marred the notebook paper.  She smeared it with her thumb.  She felt pathetic.

Problems between me and Mom? How’d you know, Macy?

Allison needed a tissue badly now.  She gathered her papers and headed for a bathroom.

On the way she walked right into David Greenbaum.  He’d been carrying a stack of books nearly three feet high, and the collision caused them to fly everywhere.  Allison raised her arms to ward off the falling literature, but the books hooked to the left at the last second to careen off a defenseless marble drinking fountain.

The impact left her head throbbing.

David stood there, gaping, for half a beat, before he realized who she was. “Allie!  Oh, gee, I’m sorry—”

Allison shook her head.  The throbbing subsided below the pain threshold.  “My fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“They just got away from me.”  David stared at the pile of books at their feet.  He looked as if he couldn’t quite believe the mess they’d caused.  Allison once found his befuddled looks cute.  Now she just found it irritating.

What did he have to be confused about?

She bent and began handing books up to him, rebuilding the stack he’d been carrying.  He flinched when she handed him the first one, and Allison couldn’t figure out why.

It’s last weekend, she thought, the scene between me and Chuck.  Now David probably blames me for ruining his party.

Great, that thought made her feel even worse.  About her. About David. About the whole awful world. She rushed through stacking the rest of David’s books.

“Are you all right?”  David asked as she began stacking books past his face.

“No damage.”  Allison balanced the last book in place, half-obscuring David’s nose.

“That’s not what I mean.  You look like you’ve been crying.”

She resisted an urge to wipe her face.  Do you really care, David?  Or are you just asking because you think you’re supposed to? “I took a long swim and decided to peel some onions afterwards.”

“Ah. Ok.”  David’s voice sounded resigned.

Allison picked up her backpack and stepped around him toward the ladies’ room.  As she retreated down the hall she heard David say, belatedly as usual, “I’m really sorry about the party.”

She didn’t respond because she didn’t know what to say.

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October 14, 2011

Saturday, October 23 08:05 AM

The temperature had dipped below freezing during the night. By morning it strained to get over forty.  Uneven slate gray clouds shrouded the sky, and the diffuse light faded all the tree-colors into a uniform mud-brown that fit Allison’s mood perfectly; cold, ugly and perfectly horrible.

Allison couldn’t remember the last time she’d been awake this early on a Saturday.  It had probably been back when she spent her mornings watching cartoons.

It wasn’t that she’d woken early.  She’d never managed to get back to sleep.  By the time she glanced at the clock and it read six-thirty, she’d given up, showered, and got herself breakfast.  All along, Allison felt on the verge of a migraine, but the headache had never materialized.

At least the fresh air helped push away that prospect.

Now she was kicking her way through the leaves in the gutter, past mostly silent houses.  She was winding her way toward the library.  It would open at nine, so she was doing her best to take a twisted route to eat up time.  She’d left at seven-thirty, as soon as she got her hair dry.  She wanted to slip out of the house before her mother woke up.

Allison still didn’t know what she would say when she finally talked to Mom.  Would she mention the overheard conversation at all?  Would she simply ask about her father?

Would she tell her mother the fact that the headaches had not ended with the doctor’s visit, and— in fact— had persisted nearly six weeks beyond and were only now fading?

“Tell her!” her father had said to Mom.

Tell me what? Allison thought.  Tell me that my father was still alive?  That was an obvious interpretation, but the way her father had spoken—

She amazed herself by how calmly she was taking that.  Her father? She was thinking about him as if he’d only been gone for the weekend.

The way John had spoken made Allison doubt that he simply wanted to divulge the fact of his existence.

When Allison turned back on to a main street, she sat down in a bus-shelter across from a closed deli and opened up her backpack.  A sheet of frost on the bench chilled a strip of flesh through the seat of her jeans.  She ignored it.

She pulled out a spiral notebook; her Trigonometry homework, notably sparse. She flipped open a blank page, fished out a pencil, and tried to transcribe the conversation from memory:

Mom: “How dare you call me here.”

She erased that.  It irritated her that she was already confusing the two calls.  She re-thought what she’d heard last night.  What was the first thing she’d heard?

Allison replaced her first line with:

Mom: “Calling here again.”

Allison decided she should have done this immediately after she had heard the phone call.  It was very hard to get the words down from memory.  Mom’s fist line was close enough.  She wrote:

Dad:

Allison erased that as soon as she wrote it.  She didn’t know that yet.  Until she had some sort of confirmation it was probably saner to assume that Mom’s late-night caller was some other person named John.

She kept telling herself it was a common name.

John: “I deserve the chance to talk to her.”

She thought for a while and couldn’t remember Mom’s next words exactly.  She wrote down:

Mom: “You have some nerve.  Good-bye, John.”

The good-bye, that she was sure of.  Now, what did he say?

John: “Tell her.  You owe her that.”

That was close enough.

Mom: “Don’t tell me how to treat my daughter.”

Allison nodded to herself.  It was an odd sensation she had.  It felt like she was trying to discover the plot of an entire novel from a stray page she’d found.

She felt her eyes watering and thought, why are you keeping things from me, Mom? Her breath was fogging in front of her, and she felt frozen to the seat.

The next line was the strange one:

John: “If they look they’ll find out about the doctor’s appointments.”

Allison stared at what she wrote.  Slowly, with a trembling hand, she underlined “they.”  “They” would be interested in her doctor’s appointments over the headaches.  John, or someone— they— thought her headaches meant something.

“Maybe I misheard it,” Allison mumbled.  “I was half asleep.”

She thought on Mom’s next line.  It was impossible to remember the tirade exactly.  She decided just to write down the gist of what she’d heard:

Mom: (goes off on the fact my headaches weren’t anything to worry about.)

As she thought about it, she added the line:

“They cleared up after the visit.”

Allison was sure Mom had said that.  But the headaches hadn’t cleared up after the visit.  Allison simply had stopped telling Mom about them.  She had managed to hide the six weeks of intermittent agony, and Allison began to think she had some unconscious complicity from her mother.  Mom didn’t want to believe Allison was having these migraines.  On the phone she’d been psycho about it.  Mom had broken down telling this John that Allison’s headaches were nothing.

Allison added the words, “nothing, nothing, nothing!” to that line.

Now that it was daylight and she was beginning to think clearly, Allison was scaring herself.  When Allison had returned from the doctor, what Mom had shown her wasn’t condescension, insensitivity, or disbelief.  It had been screaming denial.

I’ve contracted a rare genetic disorder, and it’s going to kill me because Mom can’t deal with it.

Allison got a grip on herself.  If it was a disease, those endless examinations would have shown something.  Even if the doctor didn’t understand what. If there was anything medically wrong, they would have ordered even more tests, not sent mother and daughter home with the all-clear and a speech about tension headaches.

Allison’s hand shook as she wrote the next line:

John: “Did the doctor know the other possibility?”

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October 10, 2011

Saturday, October 23 02:35 AM

Mr. Counter passed out papers to the class.  When Allison tuned over her paper, it was the love scene from Restless Nights.  Mr. Counter had covered the scene with illegible red corrections.  Across the top he’d scrawled a great big “F” and the comment “do over.”

The phone rang.

Allison turned, half-asleep, and startled a cat.  Rhett jumped out of bed right across the front of her face, waking her fully.

The phone stopped ringing.

It’s nearly three in the morning, she thought, simultaneously irritated at the caller and remembering the last call that’d roused her in the middle of the night.

From downstairs she faintly heard Mom yelling, “— dare you call here again!”

Something in Mom’s voice frightened Allison.  It was the same tone she’d heard in the previous call. But it tore at something else in her memory, something a long time ago that she couldn’t quite place. She tried to force the scary thought to the front of her mind, but the more she tried, the more it evaporated like her nightmare class with Mr. Counter.

What’s going on?

Hating herself for doing it, Allison gently lifted the handset on her extension so she could hear both ends of the conversation.  She held it away from the sound of her breathing as she clicked the pone on. The receiver came alive with a heart-stopping beep, but no one seemed to notice.

She heard a strained, agonizingly familiar, male voice say, “I deserve the chance to talk to her, Carol.”  The sound came through a lot of interference, as if the man was speaking on a cheap cell phone.

“You have the nerve to say you deserve anything?  After all this?  Good-bye, John.”

Allison had never heard her mother sound like this, and a tiny voice was screaming at her to hang up, that she didn’t want to hear any more. . .

However, the male voice was beginning to register even though it had been such a long time since she had heard it.  Even though every instinct she had told her to hang up, the voice, in connection with the name, froze her so that she couldn’t even breathe.

John was a common name. It was the strongest objection she had to the crazy thoughts running through her head. There wasn’t any way it could really be him. Mom would have told her.

The man spoke as if he actually heard Allison’s thoughts. “Don’t you under— Damn it, tell her!  You owe me nothing, but you owe her.”

“Don’t tell me how to treat my daughter.”

“If they’re looking, they can find out about the doctor’s appointments.”

Allison could hear tears and near panic in Mom’s voice.  “Those were nothing, nothing!  It was the stress of school.  The doctor said that himself.  It didn’t mean anything.  It cleared up right after the visit—”

“Did the doctor know the other possibility?”

There was silence on the line.

“Carol, there’s always been the chance.”

Allison’s mother made a noise it sounded like a sob.

“They already have info on a class one in the area. If they find out she’s a—”

“LEAVE US ALONE!”  The yell made Allison drop the phone in shock.  It bounced off the bed and landed on the floor.  Even so, Allison could still hear her mother yelling.  It came through the tinny speaker of the phone and it also came, muffled, through the floor of her room.  “Those people are crazy.  Stone’s crazy.  I don’t believe in any of this, none of it.  And I won’t have my daughter believing it.  You’re insane, John.  They’re insane.  I’ll go to court this time, publicly, if you call me again.  I don’t care who gets pulled in.  And if you come near my daughter I swear to God I’ll kill you!”

She could hear the phone slam downstairs.  She tried to get the receiver before her dad hung up, but by the time she’d gotten to the phone, there was only a dial-tone.

Allison switched it off and gently replaced the receiver.  She felt dirty for listening in, but the feeling of confusion was worse.  She had just heard an argument about her and she didn’t understand any of it.

Worst was the awful thing that ate at Allison’s heart as she tried to sleep.

Mom had told her that her father was dead.

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October 7, 2011

Friday October 22, Continued

Allison dove, stuffing her manuscript back into the shoebox.  She slipped on a throw-rug and had to catch herself on the dresser opposite the foot of her bed.  An avalanche of stuffed animals buried the News Hour as she bent and stuffed the box under the debris cluttering the bottom of her closet.

The closet was shut before she heard the door open downstairs.  Allison slumped, her back holding the closet door closed, as if her manuscript might escape.  She was still flushed and a little warm.

Realizing that, and how silly she must’ve looked, made her flush that much hotter.

A grinning Tasmanian Devil sat on top of the mound of animals Allison dislodged, winner of king-of-the-mountain.  “Stop laughing at me,” Allison told it.

Allison started to replace the dislodged multitudes as, below her, she heard her mom say, “Allie?”

“In my room, Mom.”

She heard her mother start up the steps and willed herself calm.  She was certain that her lascivious thoughts were visible on the surface of her skin.

Her mom peeked in the door, and upon seeing Allison, pushed the door the rest of the way open.  “What happened?” she asked, waving a hand at the scattered animals.

Allison gaped for a moment, frozen at the question.  Then she managed to regain her bearings.  Pasting on a smile she waved the stuffed devil toward the dresser, “A revolt.  Taz went over the wall and suddenly I had a mass escape on my hands.”

Mom smiled.  The contrast made Allison realize just how tired Mom looked.  She took Taz from Allison and gave it a mock-serious look.  “A troublemaker, eh? Perhaps she should be put in solitary.”  The humor sounded forced.

“You ok, Mom?”

“Oh?” She looked a little surprised at the question.  “No, I’m fine, just a tough day at work, that’s all.  What’re you doing home so early on a Friday?  Not feeling under the weather again, are you?”

Allison hated the phrase “under the weather.”  As far as she was concerned, anyone who wasn’t in a plane flying above cloud-cover was “under the weather.”

“No, Mom.”  Allison tried to keep the sigh out of her voice.  “I just wanted to get some homework out of the way before the weekend.”  She waved absently at the bed where her history essay was laid out like a reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg.

Mom stepped over to the bed, as if Allison’s wave was an invitation.

Mom tried to involve herself with Allison’s schoolwork.  However, lately, Allison had come to the cynical realization that her mother really didn’t pay all that much attention.  The details seemed to slip her attention.  Otherwise, Mom would’ve realized just how many days Allison had cut to sit in the bathroom and down Midol and Advil like M&M’s.

Allison watched her mother leaf through pages of her history report, when she was struck by a horrid realization.  The page Mom was currently reading was not part of her homework.  It was a page from Restless Nights.  It must have fallen out of the shoebox in her dive for the closet.

Mom arched an eyebrow and asked, “What’s this?  Not your homework?”

Oh God, oh God, oh God.  Allison just couldn’t get her mouth to work.  What could she say?  Some bandit broke in and planted blatant pornography in her bedroom?

Mom was smiling at her and Allison felt her face turn beet-red.

“Come on, tell me.”

“Its— ah— something I wrote.”

“That’s obvious.”

“A n-n-novel I worked on over the summer.  The page— it— ah— got mixed in by accident.”

“A whole novel?” Mom was looking at the page again.  Allison wished she could see what her mother was reading.  Oh please don’t let it be Melissa’s trembling breasts or Randolph’s manhood, anything but that.

“Ab-b-bout a hundred pages.”

Mom set the page down and looked at Allison.  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was embarrassed.”

“Well, don’t be.”  Mom seemed to finally recognize Allison’s discomfort.  She bent down and kissed Allison’s forehead.

“Wha?”

“I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t be reading unfinished work, should I?”

“I— uh— well—”

“I won’t stifle you.  I don’t want to see any more of it.  Not until you finish it, of course.”

Allison just nodded, lamely.

“Good.  I’m going down to fix myself some dinner.  Want anything?”

“No.”

When her mother nodded and left, Allison rushed to the bed and grabbed the page.

It was page number seven.

Allison’s sigh of relief was choked short by a small jab of pain lancing through her temples.  Just then, the animals she’d replaced on the bureau collapsed on to the floor again, Taz in the lead.

The pain vanished as quickly as it had come.

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October 5, 2011

Friday October 22, Continued

Allison lay on her bed.  Red-marked computer-draft essay surrounded her.  An unfinished gothic paperback lay open, face-down next to her pillow.  Across from the foot of the bed, a crotchety analog TV nattered on, half-buried in stuffed animals.  It was tuned to PBS and Tom Lehrer was going on about the latest difficulty around Pakistan.  Allison wasn’t paying much attention to it.

Instead, she was looking at the shoebox she had fished out of the closet.  It rested on her lap, and inside it nestled a small stack of gaudy paperbacks that her mother would never approve of.  Their covers bore no titles, only blurry photos of naked models in Victorian settings.  The women were well endowed, and lounged amidst red velvet and white lace.  Some models wore white gloves, some black.  A few wore spiked heels.  On two of the covers men were present, backs to the camera, muscular and equally nude.  The titles on the spine were all The Passion of.. something-or-other.  Allison had read every one several times, and usually just the sight of the covers could bring a catch to her throat.

The books were a secret embarrassment.  Mostly because Allison didn’t want to admit that a rather tame sextet of ancient yellowing paperback erotica could get her legs rubbing together like that.

However, at the moment, she was concentrating on another embarrassment she kept in that shoebox.  In her hands were the last of the hundred and two pages of Restless Nights, her novel.

It had been calling to her all afternoon, and she’d finally given in.  She was a fast reader, and she had managed to read through the draft— cry at the really awful parts— and reach the end all in half an hour.  And here, the last five pages, she had slowed her reading to a crawl.

Mr. Lehrer droned in the background.

She felt her face flush as she closed on the scene where Randolph and Melissa finally met, after their years of separation.  Randolph had managed to escape the Nazi prison camp, but not the false rumors of his treason.  Melissa had survived the deaths of her father and her brother to become the chaste caretaker of the family home.

Allison might hate parts of the story, parts that were wooden and clumsy now, but every page, every single word, had been an arrow pointing to this reunion.  She had written these last five pages in a white heat.  A heat that wasn’t entirely literary.

In one way it was so wrong, the book was supposed to be a dance, weaving Melissa and Randolph together.  Melissa was chaste and virginal.  Randolph was gruff and still had to prove himself not to be the traitor he was believed to be.  It was 1944, and pre-marital sex was a naughty thing. It was a romance, and you don’t have the hero and heroine do things like that before their happily-ever-after.

However, the second that Allison had written them into the same room, they had slammed together like opposing poles of a magnet.  Allison had written through nearly to the end of the scene, and it was so hot and explicit that it scared her.

Every time she reached the end, she found her pulse racing and wondered at herself.  I wrote that?

She was still frozen to the page, picturing Randolph’s hands exploring Melissa’s body, when she heard her mother’s car arrive in the driveway.

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