On the Edge of Dangerous Things (Dangerous Things Trilogy Book 1) (6 page)

Ten

The kitchen light shone into the living room, startling Hester, who had finally fallen asleep. She checked her cell phone. 3:12 a.m. The power was back. She found the remote and clicked on the television. The ShamWow infomercial guy was fast-talking about their super-absorbency. Hester clicked it off. Her head buzzed. She stood up slowly and went into the bathroom. When she flipped the switch, she was stunned. She’d forgotten about throwing up, clogging the toilet, and it spilling all over the place. The rug was soaked, the linoleum slimy. She gagged on the foul odor. Jesus, the thought of cleaning it up made her sick.

“Mrs. Murphy, you in there?”

Hester recognized Chet Blount’s nasally voice. She wished her nosey neighbor would go away. She didn’t answer.

“Just want to know if you’re alright. Got in from Ohio around midnight and couldn’t unpack without electricity, so I sat in my lounger till the lights came on. Saw yours were on, too. Figured I better check on you.” He was hollering through the kitchen window. “Maybe I’ll see you in the morning.”

Hester said nothing and held her breath until she heard the sound of his footsteps scraping through the gravel as he shuffled back to his trailer. Hester thought Chet asked too many questions, but Al said she shouldn’t let that bother her. Still, she didn’t like the way his beady eyes darted around when he was talking to her, and he was always talking. If she tried to get a word in edgewise, he stared at her blankly which gave her the impression he was skeptical of the veracity of what she was saying. He reminded her of her father who used to look at her the same way after she came home from a date. He’d ask her where she’d gone and what she’d done, then wait to catch her in a lie. Hester could barely remember what her father looked like, it had been that long since she’d seen him. He could be dead, for all she knew.

The next morning before Hester had a chance to figure out what she was going to do about the damaged roof and ruined bedroom and stinky bathroom, she saw old Chet coming around the side of his trailer, holding his mug of coffee in one hand and scratching his scruffy beard with the other. She hurried out of the sliding door and met him on the patio before he could get any closer, or God forbid, inside her trailer. It’d be impossible to get rid of him then.

That’s how lots of people at Pleasant Palms were, and it was one of the few drawbacks—she was discovering—the place had. Most residents were retired with nothing to do, so they spent eons of time talking, mostly about themselves; and when that topic was exhausted, they seemed to be on a pointless, yet thorough, fact-finding mission.

“Well, Mrs. Murphy, aren’t I glad I didn’t come down any earlier. My niece-in-law insisted I stay and have Thanksgiving with them. ‘It wouldn’t be the same without you, Uncle Chet,’ she said. So, you know, how could I refuse? My nephew would have been stuck with all those women from Beverly Ann’s side, that’s my niece-in-law’s name, Beverly Ann. Her mother, her three sisters—they’re all single—and her girlfriend Nancy Lynne all pile in on poor Matthew. He’s really always so out…”

Hester’s head was spinning.
I’ve got to get rid of him,
was all she could think.

“And he doesn’t enjoy his football game if I’m not sitting right there next to him.”

Hester shifted her weight, ran her fingers through her hair, and sighed audibly.

“Not quite awake, are you, Mrs. Murphy?” He took a sip of his coffee, and Hester thought,
thank you, God, he’s going to stop
, but he quickly continued, “I’m so glad you and Mr. Murphy will finally get a chance to spend the whole winter down here. It’s just a shame that storm hit. Who would’ve thought we’d get something like that so late in the season? The weather people had it passing south of Key West. It was just a freak of nature. Wasn’t it now? And where is Mr. Murphy anyway?”

Chet looked over Hester’s head at the sliding door. “Thought I’d like to say a welcome to him, too. See if he needs any help with fixing that mess you’ve got in the back there.”

Now what am I going to say
, thought Hester. She didn’t want to have to explain things. She appreciated his offer, but as she looked at how his eighty-five-year-old head hung down like a turtle’s and how the mug in his hand jiggled so much that coffee splashed out of it when he tried to drink from it, she knew he had no intention of making good on it.

Hester crossed her arms in front of her chest and sighed again. “Al was injured when the roof collapsed. It was minor, but they admitted him to the hospital anyway, just to be sure.”

“Oh my, well, that is a shame. When will he be home?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, if it isn’t serious, then it should be soon. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s already been almost forty-eight hours since the storm hit, so did the folks at the hospital say if it would be today or not? If it’s not serious, as you say, then he should be home today.”

Who cares when they send the bastard home!
Hester wanted to yell at the old man. Instead, she heard herself saying in a pathetically small voice, “I hope you’re right. It’s so lonely here without him.”

“I’m right next door, Mrs. Murphy. You don’t have to worry about being lonely. Why don’t I come over tonight? We’ll play some Yahtzee. I could bring some cheese and crackers. I love Yahtzee. Counting up all those black dots on the die has a way of taking your mind off your troubles. Games are good for you, Mrs. Murphy.”

“Oh, thanks, Mr. Blount, but I don’t feel up to playing.”

“Please, call me Chet, and we don’t have to play anything. Talking is just fine with me.”

“After I get back from the hospital…,” Hester lied—she had no intention of going anywhere near the hospital, “…I’ll most likely be exhausted, so maybe some other time, Chet.”

Hester thought that would settle it.

“Well, when I see you’re back, I’ll just come over to make sure you’re alright.”

“Please, I don’t want to bother you.”

“No bother, it’s the Pleasant Palms way. You’ll see. We are like one big family here. We look out for one another.”

Great
, thought Hester,
that’s just great
. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other again to buy some time to concoct another excuse while the old man wiped some coffee from his chin and said, “Oh, I almost forgot, where’s your young friend?”

Hester drew in her breath and held it.

“I spoke on the phone with Marvin Bridgeford, his wife is Eve—nice-looking woman with short auburn hair.”

“Yes, I’ve met Eve.”

“Well, the night before the storm, I talked to him, and he said you had a young visitor staying with you, a former student. Let’s see, her name was…” He held onto his chin as he tilted his head. “Now don’t tell me. I like to try to remember things on my own.”

Hester’s mind raced.

“Nina!” he shouted with delight. “Yes, Marvin said she was a nice-looking girl. So how could you be lonely with such a young treasure around?”

Hester wanted to rip the mug out of his feeble grip and dump the rest of the coffee over his head. She hated being cornered like this, and it felt like the old hoot was drilling her on purpose, almost taking delight in making her scramble for answers she hadn’t yet concocted.

“The hurricane scared poor Nina near to death. As soon as it was over, she made me take her to the station and put her on the next train back to New Jersey. I’ll miss her, I mean, we’ll miss her, but the good part is, she decided to give the community college up north another try.” Hester was satisfied with her spur-of-the-moment fabrication.

“Why didn’t she fly home?”

That was it. What difference did it make to this old guy if Nina took a plane or a train or a hot air balloon? He didn’t even know her.

“She had, I mean, has…” Hester caught herself, “…a tremendous fear of flying. Well, nice chatting with you, but I have a million things to do. Thanks for offering to help, Mr. Blount, I mean, Chet.”

Before he could say another word, Hester pulled open the slider, stepped inside, and dropped the shade. She peeked through a gap and saw he was still standing there like a pale specter from the underworld. Hester felt bad. In truth, Chet Blount seemed to be a perfectly good-hearted man, a congenial, kind man; but Hester’s nerves were so frayed she wasn’t seeing things clearly, and she knew it. At the moment she didn’t have the luxury of getting too friendly with someone who lived only ten feet away and, obviously, watched her like a hawk. Besides he seemed to be a bit of a gossip, who wouldn’t hesitate to tell everyone he met everything he knew, or thought he knew, about her. She had to set boundaries. She had no choice.

“Okay, Mrs. Murphy,” he shouted through the door, through the shade. “See you tonight.”

Hester couldn’t believe it. She heard the satisfaction in his voice, triumph even. He’d paid not one bit of attention to what she’d said, to what she’d wanted. Instead, he sounded like he was coming over for a goddamn date whether she liked it or not. It made Hester go cold inside to have her wishes so blatantly disregarded.

Okay, so maybe he’s not all that kind, maybe he’s stubborn and narcissistic,
concluded Hester.
That the man is ancient doesn’t make the fact that he’s getting his way come hell or high water any easier for me to take. 

She went into the kitchen and once again got out the bucket and some clean rags. Boundaries? Maybe it was already too late.

Eleven

In March, not quite three months after her first date with Al, Hester was driving home from work when she saw a robin by the side of the road trying to yank an earthworm out of the dirt. Ordinarily, such a harbinger of spring would’ve put a smile on her face. But today, she didn’t give a shit about spring. She gripped the wheel and prayed,
Please, God, help me, help me, help me.

If she didn’t get her period tonight, then she had to be pregnant, and it would’ve happened that night in Lambertville in the parking lot of Niece’s Lumber because Hester had not done “it” with Al since then. They’d dated and done other things, but since she couldn’t figure out how to get the pill without going to a doctor, she’d been firm with him about not going all the way. And now she’d held him off for nothing. Who said lightning didn’t strike twice?

At home she dug her sneaks out of the closet, put on her only workout outfit, and jogged from her apartment on Concord Avenue to Cadwalder Park. As soon as she got through the gates, she began to run at full speed. She passed the deer pen, the empty subterranean bear cages, the rickety old monkey house. Her chest tightened. Her heart pounded. She was sweating, and her breasts ached from bouncing up and down, but she forced herself to finish out the loop only slowing to a walk out on Stuyvesant Avenue. Her pelvic area throbbed with what she was sure were cramps, and she hugged herself in gratitude for the pain. She’d get her period for sure now. She thought of the robin and smiled to herself as she crossed the railroad tracks and turned up Concord. But by the time she got home, the glorious cramping had stopped.

In the bathroom she took off her pants and top, and studied the curve of her abdomen in the mirror. It was flat and tight; but when she turned sideways, there was the slightest bulge below her navel. Had it always been there? She wasn’t sure. She ran her hand from her rib cage to her pelvic region. It felt puffy. She took off her bra. Her nipples were dark red and covered with bumps. She cupped them and sighed. They looked and felt exactly the same as the last time she was pregnant.

How had she let this happen again? She put on her pajamas, sat at the kitchen table to grade some papers, and burst into tears. The awful memory was back.

How cold she’d been, sitting alone in that dilapidated waiting room in Philadelphia, staring at the filthy, crooked blind, the chipped paint on the frame of the half-opened window, the darkness beyond. She prayed with all her might for God to give her the strength to get up and leave, but she didn’t. Her boyfriend would never talk to her again if she didn’t go through with it. She watched the snow pile up on the sill and blow into the room. It hit the grimy linoleum and melted. The word “forlorn”—a vocabulary word Hester encountered often in literature—popped into her head. It was exactly how she felt.

Her boyfriend Arty couldn’t come with her. At the last minute, he had something, as he put it, “important to take care of.” They were walking past Holly Bush toward Main Street to catch the 4:30 bus from Glassboro to downtown Philly when he told her.

A lump rose in Hester’s throat. She thought from the beginning (he’d told her from the beginning) that he’d be with her the whole time.

“I can’t do this by myself, Arty,” Hester explained. 

“You’ll be fine. You don’t need me there. Lots of girls go through this all by themselves.”

“I’m not ‘lots of girls.’” She’d fallen a few steps behind him and hurried to catch up. “Arty, please, I don’t really want to do this at all, let alone by myself.”

They were standing side by side now, looking down the deserted street. Arty was frowning.

Hester gathered her nerve and blurted out, “You’re the one who wants me to do it.”  Her voice was strident, and immediately she regretted how she sounded. After all, Arty, who was a senior, did have a lot on his mind. Tomorrow was the lottery for the draft. All the guys on campus were upset. So she moved closer and whispered, “Please, please, come with me?” She turned and kissed his cheek just as the bus pulled up.

“I can’t. I just fucking can’t.” Arty rubbed his face where her lips had touched it. “You don’t understand. Look, don’t be such a goddamn big…” He stopped himself and stepped back.

The doors of the bus opened. Hester stepped up and looked back at him, hoping he’d follow, but he didn’t, and she noticed a hardness in his eyes she hadn’t seen there before.

Hester wanted to scream at him and call him a bastard or something as she watched his back hunch up in the cold and his head disappear between his raised shoulders as he lowered it against the wind and walked quickly away.

Every time the bus made a stop, Hester thought about getting off; but she knew Arty would be furious if she didn’t get rid of this baby.

Sitting in that disgusting waiting room was like being in limbo. The sound of the traffic six stories below coupled with the hissing and banging of the radiator were driving her nuts. She kept one hand in the pocket of her pea coat clenched around a thick wad of small bills that added up to exactly six hundred dollars. She’d never had that much money in her life. Nobody she’d met at Glassboro State College, bordered by cornfields and woebegone trailer parks, had that much money. She knew it was tough for her friends to help her out the way they did. She’d felt guilty even asking, but she was desperate. Arty had only been able to come up with forty dollars so she had to go around begging for the rest. It was humiliating, but she’d done it, and here she was, sitting here hating herself.

The older man who finally came into the waiting room had a body that filled the door frame. His head grew out of his short, thick neck like an oversized upside-down apple. He was bald. His thin, dark eyebrows had a feminine arch to them, as though they had been plucked and penciled in. His nose, which looked ridiculously small on his full face, was ruddy; his bottom lip hung down, revealing a set of pointy lower teeth and whitish gums. He smiled weakly, so Hester smiled back.

“Randal? Hester Randal? Come into my office and let’s get this over with.” The sound of his voice was so sullen, it wiped the smile off her face.

“Okay, I mean, yes, sir.” Hester didn’t know what to say. She lowered her head and followed him. Her clogs clomped loudly on the bare floors. Why had she worn the stupid things? She stood behind the man as he took a wrinkled jacket, which looked exactly like a chef’s jacket, from a coat rack and put it on. The office, as he called it, Hester could see, was just his rundown bedroom that doubled as a place where he could conduct his nasty “business.” It smelled faintly of urine and something tangy, like an Italian hoagie. There was a double bed with a rumpled coverlet along one wall and at the foot of it a low dresser with a large console television on top of it. The T.V. was on. The screen was full of nothing but static, but the man stopped to stare at it anyway.

On the other side of the room near the bathroom door was a narrow table covered with a white sheet, and on top of that a pink towel. The table was outfitted with stirrups fashioned from two-by-fours and what looked like bicycle pedals. Hester had never been to a gynecologist, so she had only a vague sense about how to mount such a contraption. The thought of lying up there at such a vulnerable angle made her sick to her stomach. At the foot of the table was a garbage can.

The bathroom door was open. A bulb hung from the ceiling. The mirror on the medicine cabinet was webbed with cracks. The sink was coated with soap residue.

“I’ll take the money now. You do have the money?” The man was still staring at the grainy image on the television. Hester handed him the roll of bills. He counted them carefully, then stuck the wad in his pocket.

“Take off your coat, pants, and panties. Give them to me. Get up on the table. Lay on your back.” The man’s voice was matter-of-fact. Hester did as she was told. She sat on the table and pulled her T-shirt down and watched as the peace sign on the front elongated into an oval. She covered her naked pubic area with the pink towel. The man watched her and then went into the bathroom. She lay down. The bathroom door was still open and the light bothered her eyes. She shut them.

She fought with herself not to cry. What good would it do? There was no one there to comfort her. The man didn’t seem to care about much of anything, and if she cried, it might annoy him, and everything might be worse. Hester took a deep breath and exhaled and tried to think only of Arty. Already, she’d forgiven him for not being there.

“It’s our only way out,” Arty decided quickly on the abortion when Hester told him she missed her period. He was upset and seemed angry with her. It was as though she was confessing a grave sin to someone who had no part in it. She was the one, the only one, responsible for the transgression. She waited for her penance, and he pronounced it. The sinner would have to have the sin ripped out of her.

“But, Arty, the thought of it makes me sick. Can’t we…” She hoped they could…what? Get married? She knew it was too soon to say that to him. Something like that had to come from him.

Hester couldn’t go to her parents. Since she left home for college in late August, her parents called on the pay phone in the dorm hall every Saturday night at eleven o’clock. Had she made curfew? Did she remember about Mass tomorrow?

“I know you’re a good girl, Hester,” her mother would say, then she’d hand the phone to Hester’s father.

“Remember, we trust you. You have a big responsibility to set a good example for your sister.” He’d clear his throat and continue, “Say your prayers and stay away from the young men down there. I’m your father and I’m telling you, they are only after one thing. And we didn’t raise you like that.” Hester knew the translation: make sure you don’t lose your virginity.

God, she hated the sound of her father’s voice. She’d lost her virginity before she’d even figured out the layout of the campus, so it was difficult for her to hear him hammering home this dictum about saving herself for marriage and all that. Her father couldn’t begin to understand how deeply in love she was, how it was only human nature to want to give yourself completely to the person you truly loved.

She’d hang up the receiver seething with anger, then slowly it would subside, and she’d start thinking maybe she should tell her parents about Arty, maybe they would understand. And guilt would begin slithering around inside her. She shouldn’t be doing what she was doing with Arty, and she knew it. And when she was on the brink of resolving to never let Arty touch her again, her heart would start racing,
but one day he will be my husband, one day we will be together forever.

The man coughed and Hester opened her eyes. He came out of the bathroom with two pills in one hand and some sort tool in the other. Hester started sobbing. The contraption looked like a big claw. In a flash she knew she should’ve gone home to her parents—they’d been right all along. Boys were nothing but trouble. Dear God, she was sorry she’d ever met Arthur Kendall. 

“What is that? What are you going to do with it?”

The man cleared his throat, but said nothing. He moved closer until he stood next to her.

“No! No! No!”

“Calm down. Take these.” He sounded impatient.

Hester was shaking and crying.

“Lean up and take the pills.” He dropped the pills into her palm. She swallowed them down dry.

The man lifted the towel off of Hester and moved to the foot of the table. He told her to put her feet in the stirrups and slide toward him. She tried to adjust her legs and feet and wiggle her bottom down toward him, but she wasn’t doing it fast enough so he reached up, grabbed her by her hips, and pulled her buttocks to the end of the table. Hester gagged at his touch. She was weak with dread. He was impatient now. She could sense it. She watched him as he adjusted the claw. He started talking. Or was it singing? Everything began to sound like it was coming from far away. He put his forearms between her knees and tried to force them apart. Hester tried to keep her legs together, tried to say something, tried to keep her eyes open, but they kept closing. She felt awful, then limp, then like dust, and finally like she was being blown away.

When she awoke, she was in the middle of a dream. A team of surgeons was trying to remove a tumor from inside her head. She had floated out of her body and was up on the ceiling looking down at it. They were leaning over her, and the backs of their white coats and their heads looked like a tightly closed chrysanthemum. She tried to get a glimpse of the tumor, but couldn’t. The doctors began talking, and she drifted back into her body. They congratulated her because they had never seen anything like the strange growth they had just removed. They brought it over to show her. It was a lump of slimy flesh that looked like a fat chicken wing with two small feet, one perfectly shaped, the other so deformed it looked like a hand with two fingers.

“Why, at first, we thought it was a baby coming out of your skull!” One doctor was smiling at her, and her inclination was to thank him, but before she could, she woke up.

She was not on the table, but in the bed still naked from the waist down. Something was wedged up into her vagina. Dizzy and sweating, Hester threw off the thin blanket and put both hands between her legs. The bulge of cloth was soaking wet. She pressed on it and the pain was excruciating.

The man was asleep in a threadbare chair. His head was back, his mouth open. He was snoring loudly. His puffy chins jiggled when he exhaled.