Preta's Realm (4 page)

Drew ignored the comment and continued. “It felt like there was someone else in the room. I felt different. The shadows didn’t act like normal shadows do.”

“Gimme the money shot,” said Brian.

“I heard words. Something about ‘short,’ but I fucking heard them, man. I am not kidding.”

Brian whistled and made the loco gesture next to his right temple.

“I knew you’d be an asshole about it,” said Drew.

“What do you want me to say? What if I had come to you with this story?” Brian’s extension buzzed and lights flashed across the surface of the phone. He reached out with the left hand and snagged the receiver. “No. No, I have not gotten to the CSS code yet.”

Brian looked at Drew and shrugged his shoulders. Drew stood and walked back to his cubicle.

***

He cranked the radio the entire way home. As “the big 4-0” came closer, he found himself splitting time between heavy metal and afternoon talk shows, an unthinkable compromise to the teenager he once was. The clouds suffocated the landscape, swallowing the snow-covered lawns of suburbia. Spring would arrive in less than forty days through the seemingly eternal vise-grip of winter. As the disembodied voices continued to chatter through the stereo speakers, Drew’s mind floated back to her.

“Why did you do that?”

“Retract it?”

“No. Send it. Why did you send it in the first place?”

Vivian pushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear and crossed her legs in the chair. “I was hurt. I lashed out.”

“You could have ruined my career, my marriage, my life.”

Again, Vivian uncrossed and re-crossed her legs. Drew caught glimpses of the garter straps at the top of her thighs. He looked around as if he could will another human to enter the break room. The microwave and mini-fridge sat silently, offering no help.

“I’ll be here,” she said.

“You have to let this be, Vivian. Please.”

“You and I are fated, Drew. I felt it the first time we met. You’ll come to me and I’ll be here. I promise.”

She stood and placed a benign kiss on his left cheek. He felt the moist, warm touch of her lips that made his entire upper body twitch. She let her breath linger on his skin long enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck, before she tossed her hair to the side, opened the break room door, and strutted back to her cubicle.

Chapter 4

“You’re sitting in the driveway?”

Drew looked out the driver-side window at Molly, standing there in the snow-packed driveway, her coat pulled tight to her chest with her left hand. The engine was still running, the radio personalities still arguing.

“Yeah. Didn’t want to miss the end of this segment. Interesting stuff on global finance.”

Molly gave Drew a half-hearted smile and then climbed through the snow to the garage door. She kicked the clinging ice from her boots and stepped inside. Drew turned the volume knob to the left and winced at the sting of the little white lie. He turned the ignition off and sat in the car listening to the engine block ping and crack where extreme heat met extreme cold.

Gotta quit looking over my shoulder
, he thought as he reached to the passenger seat to grab his messenger bag and gloves.

***

“Are you okay?” Molly asked.

“Yeah, hon. I’m fine,” replied Drew.

“You seem to be a bit out of it recently. I was just mentioning it in case you thought it might be wise to see Dr.—“

“I said I’m fine,” replied Drew, cutting off Molly’s sentence.

“I can’t go through that again. I mean I would, cause I love you, but I just don’t know if I have the strength.”

Drew looked at Molly and saw the scars on her psyche caused by his breakdown. He thought about her coming out to the driveway this evening and could not remember how long he sat there once he shoved it into park.

“I’m fine, really. I’ll go and have them double-check the dosage if you think I should.”

She reached across the table and placed her hand on his. He saw the sparkle of her grandmother’s engagement ring in the light and the way it reflected off her eyes made his heart flutter.

“With the kids now, it’s just that—“

“I fucking heard you the first time!”

The wall shook from the force of Drew’s chair smashing into it. Several glasses on the table toppled and rolled to the edge, dispersing milk to the floor below. When Billy and Sara came running into the dining room, Molly clutched the collar of her shirt to her neck and ushered them up the steps and into their bedrooms.

Drew walked to the living room and collapsed on the couch. He felt the walls closing in, his vision narrowing with the onset of the migraine. He thought about his outburst and the look on Molly’s face for a split second before seeping back into his anger. The television war between Tom and Jerry continued as Jerry shoved a bomb into Tom’s mouth. Drew fumbled for the remote control and pushed buttons until he could no longer hear the commotion. He turned to his side and buried his head in a pillow on the couch. Drew laid there for a few minutes before he opened his eyes. When he did, the room sat under a blanket of solitude. The only light came from the VCR clock that read 2:29. He had slept for the better part of four hours.

A buzzing sound came from the end table where Drew’s phone sat.

Text or email
, he wondered while reaching for it. He could not remember setting it to vibrate, but that’s what it was doing. The vibration ceased as Drew turned it towards his face. When he touched the screen, there was no message.

He dropped the phone on the table hard enough to register disgust but without enough force to break it. Drew sat and rubbed a hand through his hair. He heard Sara snoring and smelled the sour milk that had congealed on the floor underneath the dining room table. He lost the evening to rage and a migraine, a couple that liked to go out together at his expense.

The old refrigerator buzzed and popped while the amber glow from the streetlamps returned to the room. A few random toys lay scattered on the floor, novelty pencils and scraps of notebook paper scribbled with broad strokes of permanent marker. The winter wind grabbed the wooden storm doors and shook them to the core. Drew stood and felt the floor shift beneath his feet. He sat back down on the couch.

“Prison.”

He turned to face the gaping maw of the doorway leading to the stairs. Shadows wavered like a mirage on a desert highway. Drew slid a finger between the blinds and scanned the front yard for a sign. Nobody outside the house and nobody at the door.

“It’s all a prison.”

The sentence could not be mistaken for random noise. Drew sat back on the couch and closed his eyes. He felt swirls of red passing beneath his closed eyelids and a slight buzz in his extremities that caused his fingers to tingle. His mouth went dry and his tongue turned into a wad of cotton.

“What is?” He heard his words but could not tell if they originated from his mouth or from the charged ether of the room.

“All of it.” The voice delivered the words with perfect diction, but as if spoken from the bottom of a well. Each syllable resonated and reverberated with mathematical precision.

“I don’t understand,” Drew replied, this time certain he had spoken the words and not thought them.

“You will. Now that we have been introduced, there are important things that must be done.”

Drew put both hands on his ears. He had to convince himself that he was not wearing headphones, listening to a psychedelic recording that pushed the audio back and forth across the stereo field. The voice bounced from left to right as if a cyclone of sound swirled around his head. “I’m coming apart. Again.”

A slight sigh brushed past Drew’s nose. His eyes saw nothing but the darkness of the witching hour holding dominion in his living room.

“I can help you.”

“Where do I begin?” Drew asked.

“The temptress,” replied the voice, the last syllable trailing away like the hiss of a serpent.

***

Drew awoke by leaping out of bed. He leaned over and kissed Molly on the cheek, something that all but extinguished around year seven of the marriage. She opened one eye and smiled before turning over and hitting the snooze button on her side of the alarm.

He smoothed down the collar and fixed his tie in the mirror. A set of bright eyes and a slightly upturned smile looked back. Drew pulled Billy and Sara’s doors shut to give them another thirty minutes of sleep before they had to get ready for school. He bounced down the steps, mumbling the melody of a long-forgotten tune from the 1940s big band era. He never listened to the Benny Goodman stuff, but his grandfather loved it. Drew remembered going to his grandparents’ place every Sunday and thumbing through his grandfather’s record collection. The album covers intrigued him more than the music. The big band and jazz records celebrated sadness that promoted a good mood, a paradox lost on children.

***

The sedan cruised towards the off-ramp like it had hundreds of times before. Drew steered the vehicle with the slight guidance of his left hand while the right fumbled through the controls on his MP3 player jacked into the car’s stereo system. He scanned through the folders and hit the play button on the Dropkick Murphys.

Irish punk-drunk rock
, he thought.

He ripped the volume knob to eight and basked in the fast-paced, bagpipe-laden motif of Boston’s finest. With Bob Marley and the Dropkicks on his player, it was difficult to feel down for long.

He grabbed his travel mug, messenger bag, and gloves as he skipped through the set of revolving doors of the office building. Drew smiled at the others in the elevator, even those hammering away on their smartphones and BlackBerrys. He hummed “Jump Jive an’ Wail” as the cable tightened and pulled the occupants into the upper reaches of the building.

***

“Resigned?”

“Quit.”

“Same difference. How did you find out?”

“Got the whole department buzzing. Haven’t you been to the break room yet?”

Drew shook his head, indicating that he had not been part of the rumor buzz infiltrating the floor. “What’s the scoop?” he asked Brian.

Brian sat on the edge of Drew’s desk. He leaned forward and lowered his voice as if divulging top-secret, highly classified information. “Johnson found a letter of resignation on his desk this morning. Her desk is cleaned out.”

“What did it say?”

“Something about a family situation that ‘demanded immediate attention’ and that she regretted leaving this way.”

“She doesn’t have family. I thought she was an only child and her parents were dead?”

Brian sipped from his coffee and exhaled a satisfied breath. “Extended family?” he asked Drew.

“None that I know of,” Drew replied.

“Don’t you think it’s weird that she printed out her resignation? Why not email it or leave a voice mail? I know that it’s more professional to write a letter, but if you quit like this I’m not sure what good a hard copy does ya.”