Better Left Buried (18 page)

She switched off the overhead light and turned on the lava lamp, finding it strange
to have to sleep alone then remembering that it was how most people her age slept. She tucked herself in, hugging a pillow, and set the picture back on the nightstand.

“Goodnight, Mom. Goodnight, Dad.”

She was nearly asleep when she heard the reply.

“
Goodnight.
”

Her eyes sprang open and there was a weight, like something pressing down on her chest.

A shadow appeared in the corner, gray on black and barely visible. She had thrown out the alarm clock she couldn’t get to reset, but didn’t need it to know what time it was.

Fear
cemented her in place. A white light shimmered in her periphery, moving across the picture frame glass, and she watched, helpless, as her favorite photo started to change.

The blue sky turned gray
. Storm clouds eclipsed the sunlight. Sadness overtook her mother’s joyful expression and bruises emerged on her cheek and chin. Her eye blackened and swelled shut, the way it had looked in the worst of the pictures. Blood spattered her own face and the front of the pale Easter dress she’d been wearing. Her cheeks glistened with tears.

Harmony
opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Her breath hung as a white cloud in a room that had turned to ice. Frost gathered on the windows and the glass crackled as it was consumed. The shadowed form in the corner crept up the walls and across the ceiling, its jagged edges crawling like fingers against the fresh white paint, reaching for her.

Goodnight.

Goodnight.

Goodnight.

The
menacing voice whispered the word over and over.

Harmony
covered her ears, but the sound found its way through.

Her eyes refused t
o close.

Whatever she was supposed to
see hadn’t yet become clear. The image of her father grew thin, starving. Blood filled his shirt collar and his blue lips receded, exposing tobacco-stained teeth and a bloody maw that twisted with what looked like a cry for help. He was rotting, decomposing on paper, and forcing her to watch. His skin stretched, melting like putty then slipping from his bones. He was a skeleton, a shell of a man.

B
loody fingerprints appeared on the freshly white walls, forming the words: “Help me”.

Harmony awoke on the first day of her fresh start vowing not to let anything take it from her. She sat on the front porch, a lit cigarette between her fingers, convinced that what she’d seen the night before had been another nightmare. There wasn’t a shred of proof otherwise. She woke up, warm and safe, to a picture as perfect as when Lance had framed it. Nothing was out of place. There were no cryptic messages spelled out on the wall, no shadows for anything to hide in.

Whatever
help the entity needed, her mother needed it more.

She checked the time on her phone and called Lance one last time, hoping he’d answer because there was no easy
way to explain to Adam how her trailer became renovated overnight. Lance was too sore a subject to mention.

“Hey, it’s me, again,” she said, leaving another message. “I know you’re busy, but I was wondering if I could catch a ride with you to pick
my mom up at the hospital. Give me a call back if you get this is the next five minutes or so. Thanks.”

For as jealous as Adam
was about the attention she got from other men, which he claimed was because she was ‘flirty’, it wasn’t jealously that made him hate Lance. It was the fact that he dealt pot. Adam, for all his common sense otherwise, saw no difference between a joint, a pill, and a needle. Though he’d opened up about several of the more traumatic scenes from his life, whatever had him so adamantly against drugs remained a closely guarded secret.

Lance
was cast as a villain long before Adam knew she had slept with him.

She
waited another five minutes before dialing Adam’s cell.

Lance dabbled in fixing things.

Adam made a career out of it.

He
picked up the phone on the second ring. “Are you ready?” Like nothing was wrong, like he’d been expecting her.

“Whenever you are.”

She locked
the front door. It had been a treasure hunt to find a key, but she had what might be the only one.

Adam arrived in under ten minutes and hurried to open the truck door for her. His black hair was tucked under a grease-stained baseball cap with lettering the same color blue as his eyes. A pair of coveralls sat wadded up behind the passenger’s seat and all she could smell was oil.

“I missed you last night.
” Adam kissed her.

“Yeah, me, too.”

“You okay? How’d your clean-up go?” He seemed markedly happier than the last time she saw him.

“
Great. You won’t believe how good it looks in there. Mom’s going to love it, I think.”

He glanced
at the mountains of trash bags and smirked. “I sure hope so because the garbage man isn’t going to be happy.” He joked and smiled as if, in the last twenty-four hours, he had been reinvented.

She liked this
easier, agreeable version. He was more the man she fell for. She moved across the seat to be closer to him, wondering how long things could stay as they were, and gasped when she saw Lance’s Grand Prix pull onto the access road they were exiting from.

Pinewood Estates
had one road in and out, with a maze of connecting streets crowded with a mixed bag of trailers ranging from landscaped to ruined. The older folks who had committed their lives to the place are what made it livable.

Lance looked right at her and she grabbed Adam’s hand to distract him,
but it was too late.

“I can’t believe
he’s
still here.”

The car was a dead giveaway, legendary in its inability to ever be finished.

“Yeah, so Mom gets out at 11:00.” Avoidance seemed the best option. “Hopefully they won’t hold us up going over the discharge instructions, but seriously, sometimes that takes like an hour. I have to get some groceries at some point, but I want to make sure Mom gets settled in first. We have that appointment with Bennett in two days.” She was talking too much, but didn’t care.

“Then I suggest you keep an eye on that one.” Adam hitched his thumb over his shoulder. “Last thing you need is her getting more out of her mind than she already is.”

She wanted to tell him that Lance sold pot, nothing else, and that he’d promised not to even sell her mother that after her attempted overdose, but she smiled and said, “I don’t plan on letting her out of my sight.”

Harmony stepped into the crowded elevator, pressed the button for the fifth floor, and reached for Adam’s hand.

“You
all right?” he said.

She nodded, but she
was definitely
not
okay. Her stint at Spring View had started with a transfer from the very unit she was about to voluntarily return to. Having been on the other side of that locked door, she couldn’t help feeling they wouldn’t let her back out.

The Behavioral Health Unit was
at the far end of a long hallway, separated from the rest of the hospital by a security device that required a special tag to open. Signs warned of an “Elopement risk”, an odd term that really meant “Caution: beware of escape mental patients”.

Harmony pressed the
visitor’s doorbell and held her breath.

A middle-aged nurse wearing a nametag that read “Norma” answered. She was tall, five-ten at least. Her broad shoulder
s stretched the fabric of her blue scrubs and there was a hardness about her that warned she wasn’t to be messed with.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m here for my mother, Charity Wolcott.” Harmony’s voice cracked when she said it.

“She’ll be right out.”
Norma led them into a small room where Harmony chewed her fingernails while she waited.

“
It’s going to be fine.” Adam pulled her hand away from her mouth. “Relax.”

Harmony
clasped her hands, but immediately returned to chewing. All she wanted was to feel the fall breeze on her face and smell the fresh air.

The door opened and Norma returned with her mother and the familiar clipboard. A plastic b
ag of pill bottles hung from Norma’s left hand and there was a pen tucked behind her ear.

Charity
looked rested, but distant, as if she were staring past or through all of them. Her neatly combed hair had been tied back, most likely by one of the nurses, and even though the change was slight, her face seemed fuller. She’d been eating, sleeping, and looked better than Harmony had seen her in a long time.

“Mom.”
Harmony hugged her, but the embrace was one-sided. Charity put one arm loosely around her and then let it fall at her side. Harmony didn’t blame her. She knew the feeling of medicated emptiness all too well.

“Are we ready?” Norma said.

Charity shuffled across the floor and sat down in a chair off by itself. They’d put her in donated clothes: a baggy sweatshirt and a pair of loose jeans that looked like they might have been men’s.

Harmony sat next to Adam
on the couch across from Norma, listening as she listed all of the medications, dosages, warning signs, and precautions that needed to be taken.

Harmony nodded in agreement with each of them
.

“Do you have any questions?”
Norma said.

Harmony
shook her head. “No, nothing. We’re ready to get her home.”

Norma handed
Charity the clipboard to sign and Harmony the bag of pills. “There should be a week’s supply in there to get her started. We’ve applied for Medicaid for her, but the outpatient clinic will have samples until she gets coverage. A patient advocate will call tomorrow to let you know that everything has been approved and to schedule her next appointment.”

Charity
let her Medicaid lapse every year, only renewing it when the hospital did the work.

“Thank you,” Harmony said and waited through a long silence for her mother to hand back the clipboard. Her signature looked like interpretive art,
a side-effect, no doubt, of being drugged.

“That’s it?” Adam asked.

Norma tucked the clipboard under her thick arm. “That’s it.” She set her hand on Charity’s shoulder. “You take care of yourself, now. You hear?”

Charity nodded
as Adam helped her out of the chair.

Norma held the door while Harmony exchanged places with
Adam. “Why don’t you pull the car around front? We’ll meet you.” As slow as her mother was moving, she considered grabbing a wheelchair.

Adam kiss
ed Harmony on the cheek and hurried down the hall, taking the stairs while they waited for the elevator. Not a single word was exchanged in the long silence after Harmony pressed the call button. Charity barely blinked. She hadn’t succeeded in killing herself, but something inside her was clearly dead.

“Wait until you see the house,”
Harmony said. “It’s fixed up so nice.”

Charity sighed.

The elevator doors opened and Harmony had to all but shove her inside.

“It’s all right,” Harmony
said. “It’ll be quick.” There was no way to get her mother safely down several flights of stairs.

An
elderly couple, the only other people in the car, moved into the corner, exchanging wide-eyed glances and a look that might have been the wife’s way of saying, “How about we get off?”

Harmony held her mother’s hand, praying
for a direct trip to the ground floor.

“I only wanted to keep you safe,
” Charity whispered.

“I know you did, Mom.”

It had taken some digging to put everything together—but between the bruises, the accident, and her father going missing—Harmony knew what her mother meant and guessed what she might have done to protect her.

Very little embarrassed Harmony, a fact she’d become proud of after years of being made fun of. She prided herself on self-sufficiency, a façade considering her means, but the thought of anyone giving her anything made her cringe. It picked away at the flaw in her tough exterior and contradicted the image that she could conquer anything. Pulling up to the trailer, the first things she noticed were four sacks of groceries she immediately knew were from Lance.

“Looks like someone’s been paid a visit by the grocery fairy.”
Adam shifted the truck into park.

Harmony, who had been sitting
in the middle, reached across her mother to open the passenger’s side door. “It had to be Sylvie. You know how she is.” She held her mother’s arm until she was steady and stepped around her. “Let’s get you inside. I can’t wait for you to see what I did.” She produced the key and rushed to open the door.