Stray Fears Read online

  In real life, I had tried to help her. I had found her nightgown stained with a red oval. I had found the gunshot wound to her chest.

  In the dream, I drifted on.

  I found my dad next. That part was flat-out untrue; in real life, he had died in his bed, shot in the head while he was still asleep. I had found him last. But now, in the dream, he was in the kitchen too, lying spread eagle on the floor, his head blown open, brain and bone and blood like grayscale confetti on the boards.

  The door to the porte cochere was open; it was December, and even in New Orleans, December was cold. The frigid air came in like waves that hit me at the knee; in real life, everything had smelled like shit and piss and body cavities blown open, but now I tasted grass, tasted mud, tasted catfish, tasted the cool, wet gravel of the drive under the porte cochere. That night, I had thought the killer had escaped through the door. I went after him. I had some idea—I must have believed—that I could catch him.

  And I had caught him, in a way, I guess. Gard was sitting in a webbed lawn chair, where he and Dad liked to drink on hot nights under the porte cochere. One hand was wrapped around the aluminum arm rest; the other held the .38, which had slipped out of his mouth and had snagged on the pearl-snap shirt he thought made him look like a cowboy. On the ground was the pillow he had used to improvise a silencer—why I’d heard thumps instead of gunshots, why I hadn’t interrupted my fuck. Gard’s back was to me, his head hanging over the lawn chair, facing me upside down. His eyes were blue, a bioluminescent glow.

  He raised the .38. Some of the soft tissue from his palate clung to the barrel, a black clump that broke the gun’s clean lines. He traced a circle in the air.

  Every night, I woke screaming.

  Tonight was Sunday, almost a week since Mason had tried to shoot me on the steps of DuPage First Methodist. I sat in bed, hunched over, sobbing into my knees.

  Richard’s breathing changed when he woke. His hand found my back, ran up my spine, squeezed my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  He pulled me down to lie next to him, hugging me against him while I cried, his chin resting on my shoulder. After a while, he started shifting around, trying to pull his hips back. I sniffled into the pillow, wiped my face, and scooted back until I made contact again. Richard pulled his hips back again. I slid with him, grinding into his erection.

  “Elien,” he said, his breathing uneven. “I’m sorry, it’s just a reaction to . . . to what I feel for you. I know it’s inappropriate, and I—”

  I pressed back harder, and then I took his wrist, and slid his hand down between my legs. I never got hard anymore. Never. Weight gain, emotional numbness, and sexual dysfunction—including the inability to orgasm. The holy trinity of side effects from antidepressants, and I had enough antidepressants in me to pep up a clown college. But I kept Richard’s hand in place. We’d done this before, and he knew what I wanted. He touched me for a while through my briefs. Then he rocked into me, slowly at first, then with more insistence. I wasn’t going to bone up, but it was still nice to be appreciated.

  “Make love to me,” I whispered into the pillow.

  He kissed my neck. “Another night, when you’re feeling better.”

  Kicking my way free of the briefs, I wrapped his hand around me, still limp, and said, “Fuck me.”

  “I don’t think—”

  I rolled over, kissed him, and forced him onto his back. I worked his boxers down, took him in my mouth, and gave him some attention. First-class attention. I knew when he was close because he got mouthy, started saying dirty things he’d never normally let slip, and that’s when I pulled off.

  “Fuck me,” I said, wiping the back of my hand across my mouth.

  Richard pressed me into the mattress, got my leg over his shoulder, and worked a lubed finger into me. Then another.

  “Just fuck me,” I said.

  “You get what I give you,” he said. This was the side that came out during sex. His fingers twisted, punching the breath out of me. “Who owns this ass?”

  “You do,” I whispered.

  “Who decides what you get?”

  “You do,” I said, a little louder.

  He played with me for a while, and then he fucked me. At first, the pace was steady. Then it grew ragged, harder. I kept my eyes open, staring up at the ceiling. Not feeling anything, I had discovered, wasn’t the same as feeling nothing. It was kind of the opposite actually. It was intense. An intense inversion. A hunger to feel something. Anything. I hooked my free leg, trying to pull Richard into me. I put my arm over my eyes and started to cry.

  Richard’s hips bucked. He had one hand on my chest like he was trying to stop a train. “Elien—Elien—”

  “Just fuck me,” I said through the tears.

  He jerked his way through the orgasm, and then he fell on top of me. The first few times, I had thought maybe he’d had a heart attack. Then, for a while, it had been endearing. Now I lay there, pinned by his weight, by sweaty, sagging skin, his mouth hot against my neck.

  I visualized the farthest point in space I could imagine, the farthest distance a particle could travel away from anything else—no stars, no planets, no comets, not even a black hole. That distant place. Just a particle, floating by itself. I kept telling myself I felt nothing, felt absolutely nothing, felt absolutely nothing at all. I was distantly aware that I was sobbing so hard I was shaking, even with Richard’s weight on top of me.

  After a while, he got up, favoring one knee, and made his way to the locked bag where he kept the good stuff. He fumbled with something. A hypodermic needle flashed in the light of the clock radio. He tapped the syringe, tested the plunger.

  “Ok,” he whispered as he sat next to me, stroking my hair. “Give me an arm.” The cold wetness of a sterilizing wipe ran over my bicep, and then the sting of the needle followed.

  I cried for a while, my head in Richard’s lap, and then I wasn’t me anymore. I was a thousand drops of something better, suspended in ether. I was blue. I was a swarm of fireflies.

  In my last moments of clarity, I remembered Mason’s eyes as he tried to kill me, the glint of blue fire. I had to know. I had to know. I had to know.

  And then the wind blew, and I was nothing.

  DAG (2)

  I was slumped over the kitchen table, listening to a really nice beluga track, when Mom sat down next to me. She took out one of my earbuds and said, “Dagobert, your father and I would like to talk to you.”

  I took the earbud and put it back in.

  It had been a week.

  A week since I had looked in my rearview mirror and seen Mason on the steps of DuPage First Methodist.

  A week since I had watched my best friend from high school pull a gun on an innocent man.

  A week since I had grappled with him.

  A week since the gun had bucked in my hand, and a blue firefly had floated out of Mason’s mouth, and the world had stopped making sense.

  “Dagobert. Dagobert!”

  I thumbed up the volume on the iPod, and after a while, my mom went away.

  The kitchen smelled like chili powder and garlic, like sage and oregano, like trout done in Mom’s cast iron skillet. The table was smooth and cool under my cheek. From where I sat, I could see out the back door, across the little stretch of grass, all the way to the Montgomery’s shed on the lot behind us. I might as well have been looking across an ocean.

  A hand came to rest on my back; even through my shirt, I could tell it was my dad’s: the calluses, the size, the way he nudged the same vertebra with his thumb every time. He sat down in the seat Mom had vacated. He took the iPod from me, mashed it—the poor guy had no idea what he was doing—and eventually swore and gave up.

  “This is pathetic,” I said, plucking out the earbuds.

  “Oh,” he said. “You should see me with the VCR. I’m a whiz with the VCR.”

  “You still own a VCR?”

/>   “Some of your mom’s favorite movies are on videocassette. Black Beauty, The Buttercream Gang, that one about the dumplings. The Dumpling Gang. Is that it?”

  “Lot of movies about gangs.”

  “I’m not sure.” He called over my head. “Sweetheart, what was the dumpling movie?”

  Mom’s footsteps moved behind me. “The Buttercream Gang.”

  “No, the one about dumplings.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about with dumplings, Hubert, I really don’t.”

  “Mom, sit down,” I said. “Let’s get this over with so you can both go back to feeling incredibly self-satisfied about how good you are as parents.”

  “Ouch,” Mom said as she took a seat at the table.

  “That’s not very fair,” Dad said.

  “It’s true. You were so proud when I came out. You were so proud when I decided to be a cop. You were so proud when I got a participation trophy in soccer in third grade.”

  “You kicked a goal,” Dad said.

  “Against my own team,” I said, and then I had to pinch the corners of my eyes and breathe slowly. “Guess Mason just got to experience the adult version of that.”

  “Dagobert LeBlanc,” Dad said. “You might be twenty-seven years old, but I will beat your ass red with my belt if you ever say anything like that again.”

  “You don’t even own a belt,” I said. “You got suspenders because you said your last belt gave you a hernia.”

  Mom’s fingers ran over my head, tickling the short, buzzed hairs. “Your father was right. That belt was a menace.”

  “He was my best friend,” I said. “And I killed him.”

  “The preliminary findings said it was self-inflicted,” Dad said.

  I turned into the table.

  “Dag, sweetheart,” Mom said. “It was not your fault.”

  “He would have shot that boy,” Dad said. “You said so yourself.”

  The image that came on me was so sudden and so shocking that I had to tense against it: knocking over the table, beating the shit out of them, hitting them over and over again until they wouldn’t talk anymore, wouldn’t say anything anymore. It was hard to breathe through the intensity of the thought. My fists were too tight, my back was too tight, my chest was too tight.

  “Yeah,” I finally whispered. “I know.”

  “Your father and I think you should see someone,” Mom said. “This is killing you, Dagobert.”

  When I closed my eyes, I could feel the gun between our hands. I remembered the force of it, driving into my palm when it fired. I groped blindly across the table until I found the earbuds, and then I jammed them back into place and disappeared under the sea.

  I couldn’t hear the disappointed sighs. I couldn’t see the disappointed glances. After a while, they left.

  The problem, though, was that they’d stirred up all the shit that had been sinking so nicely to the bottom of my brain. The problem was that I knew they were partially right: this was killing me. I knew that what I’d seen was impossible: there was no such thing as blue fireflies that came out of someone’s mouth, no such thing as blue fire that burned in someone’s eyes. But I also knew that I’d seen it. I’d seen it at Ray Field’s house. I’d seen it again with Mason.

  I wondered if this was how Mason had felt: this creeping uncertainty, the feeling that he couldn’t trust his own senses, couldn’t put himself back together because somebody had mixed in pieces from the wrong puzzle. He’d said those bizarre things about Elien. He’d been trying to tell me, I realized now, that he needed help. And I hadn’t listened. I’d been too irritated with him. I’d been sick of shouldering all the slack that Mary Ann had sloughed. I’d wanted him to lay off of Elien. I’d missed the warning signs. I’d missed Mason’s cry for help. I’d been so focused on Elien that—

  My head shot up from the table. I blinked. I’d been so focused on Elien being cute and funny and maybe a little sweet that somehow I’d missed the strangest link in the last few days: Elien had been at both of those inexplicable occurrences. As a deputy, I’d come across a few deceased people—usually elderly people, while I was responding to a callout for a wellness check, the way I had for Ray. But I’d never seen the blue fireflies until Elien was there. The same thing had happened when Mason had died: another blue light.

  Except it all sounded batshit crazy.

  And that was the choice it came down to: either I was crazy, or I wasn’t. Deciding I was crazy wouldn’t get me any answers about Mason’s death. If I wasn’t crazy, though, then something seriously weird was happening, and Elien Martel was involved in it. I wanted to know what it was.

  For the first time in days, my stomach grumbled. I got up from the table, dug around in the refrigerator until I came up with the leftover trout, the slaw, and a crock of baked beans. I was making myself a plate when Dad walked into the kitchen.

  His eyes went immediately to the food. “Oh,” was all he said.

  “I’m on paid leave for at least two weeks,” I said, hearing the disjointed remark, not fully able to explain why it mattered.

  Dad just nodded.

  “I’m not dead.”

  “No, son.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, brought them out, shoved them in again. “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?”

  “No, I’m thinking about that chocolate silk pie Mom made.” I added another portion of the trout and then, just to be safe, some more beans. “For dessert.”

  Dad looked more confused than ever, but he just nodded.

  Carrying the plate back to my room, I placed a call to Brennan Kade, a buddy who did investigative work on the side. I told him what I needed, and then I found my tablet and pulled up a browser. I was going to find out what had happened to Mason. What had really happened. And I was going to start by figuring out who the fuck Elien Martel really was.

  ELIEN (3)

  The next morning, while Richard was in the shower, I went down to the kitchen. I poured myself orange juice and stood at the island. I was sore from the night before. Sex with Richard had never been that frequent, and it had become less so as the pills took effect. Sipping my orange juice, I opened my pill organizer and dumped the vitamins and supplements and prescriptions into my hand. Blues and yellows and whites. I had almost died a week before, and those moments of visceral fear had been the closest thing to feeling alive since Gard had killed my parents and then himself.

  I went back upstairs to Richard’s bathroom. The water wasn’t running, but when I touched the handle, the door was locked. I knocked softly.

  No answer.

  I knocked a little harder.

  Nothing.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine why; Richard hated giving me ketamine, hated when I got so out of control. He didn’t want to deal with me yet. Fine. Fair. He didn’t have to. I had a question for him, a pretty important one. It was also a pretty straightforward one.

  Why the fuck was I still alive if I couldn’t feel anything?

  I went back down to the kitchen and fed the pills into the garbage disposal.

  When Richard came downstairs, I was sitting at the island, sipping my orange juice. He kissed my temple and ran a hand down my back.

  “Do you need another shot?”

  I shook my head.

  “Elien.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “No ideations?”

  “Not a single one.”

  “You’re not thinking about harming yourself?”

  I met his eyes and smiled. “I’m thinking about going to the library.”

  “That’s a change.”

  “I can read.”

  “I know you can read, sweetheart.” He poured coffee; when he held it out to me, I shook my head. “I don’t think you’ve ever gone to the library while we’ve been dating. What’s going on?”

  “Do you keep track of where I go?”

  “I just meant you’ve never talked about goi
ng to the library.”

  Smiling over the orange juice, I said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “No, I don’t keep track of your movements, Elien. You know that.”

  “You could.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I’d put an app on my phone if you wanted me to.”

  Richard sighed, spooned sugar into his coffee, and stirred.

  “You could watch me on your phone, follow me as I drive into the city, find one of those cosmetic surgery places where the only limit is money.” I squeezed the flab hanging over my waistband. “How much to have them lipo me, do you think?”

  “Are you upset with me?” Richard asked.

  “No.”

  “Is this about last night?”

  “I got exactly what I wanted last night. Did you like last night?”

  “Yes, I enjoyed it very much. I love you, and I love making love to you.” Richard tried to catch my gaze. “Are you saying these things to hurt yourself? Body dysphoria—”

  “Please don’t talk to me about body dysphoria or dysmorphia or any of that stuff today.”

  Richard’s spoon chimed against the mug as he ran it in circles through the coffee.

  “I’d like a ride to the library, please. Or I can take an Uber.”

  “I have to be in New Orleans today. Muriel can take you.”

  “Muriel needs to go to work. I’ll Uber.”

  “She drives right by the house. She can take you. Do you want to stay in Bragg all day?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll take an Uber back.” I smiled over the rim of my glass again. “You can keep track of me with your little app.”

  “I don’t know why you’re upset with me,” Richard said, taking out his phone to place the call, “but I wish you’d tell me.”

  “I’m not upset,” I said. “I’m having a great day. Maybe if you watch your little app, you’ll see me pay a visit to a special friend.”

  “Morning, Muriel,” Richard said. “Do you think you could pick up Elien on your way in? Perfect. Thank you.”