Trying the Knot (36 page)

Growing hysterical when it appeared he was
losing consciousness, she pleaded, “Jack, tell me who did this to
you.”

Jack had not expected to find his sister in
Evangelica’s apartment. When Carey Derry shot at his attackers in
the cemetery, Jack gladly let the older man carry him back to his
car. But while riding alongside Carey Derry, Jack noticed Vange’s
apartment lights on, and he insisted he be dropped off there. Her
Christmas lights flashed at him like an invitation from beyond, and
in his confused state, he fully expected to find Vange puttering
around her apartment. But instead, he found Kate sitting on the
kitchen floor alone.

He choked up blood, swallowed hard, and asked
softly, “What’re you doing here?”

“I—I’m not sure,” she said. Kate placed the
back of her hand over her mouth and shook her head unbelieving.
Tears dripped from her dark eyes, and she whispered, “I just wanted
to feel close to her, I guess. Like you must.”

He shut his one open eye and nodded
painfully. She held onto his hand and yanked at the telephone cord.
When the phone fell from its cradle, she dragged it across the
soiled kitchen floor.

Kate held him in her arms and breathed the
sweet smell of rain, sweat and blood. As she gathered him close, he
shook like a disfigured baby in her arms. While dialing the
numbers, Kate mopped his stringy blond hair away from his scraped
forehead, and she kissed his damp scalp. She sniffled as she felt
his hot tears and snot dripping against her neck. Holding onto him
tightly, his muddy, blood-soaked clothes stained her off-white
dress.

When she pulled his crimson matted T-shirt
away from his skin, she noticed the number of self-initiated scars
far outnumbered any damage that had been inflicted on him that
night. Self-mutilation was a habit he picked up after being
released from the hospital after the death of his prom date. Jules
was etched across his pallid, pigeon chest as was their mother,
grandfather and Vange’s names. His body was log of the dead and
departed.

Kate shook her head and said, “You promised
you wouldn’t cut yourself anymore. You promised me, Jack.”

He swallowed hard and closed his left eye,
which was not swollen shut.

The phone rang and rang, and she noticed the
cracked platter beside them and murmured softly, “Oh, Jack, look at
what I’ve done.” She pieced the broken shards of glass back
together and said, “It was a wedding present from Vange.”

Dialing yet another number, she rubbed his
head and said, “I can’t figure it out, Jack. I can’t figure out
why, why she’d do this to us? Why would she want to die?”

He coughed and asked hoarsely, “Why would
anyone want to live?”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“She was tired and bored, kind of stuck.”

Kate hurled the phone against the wall and
cried distraught, “No one’s home to help us, not dad, or Nick, or
anyone else, and you need to see a doctor. I’ll take you to the
hospital, okay? Can you move at all?”

He nodded, and Kate helped him to his feet.
Jack leaned heavily against her, and she wrapped her arm around his
back with her hand under his armpit. Careful not to touch any of
his bloody lacerations, she gave him a peck on the cheek and
supported him down the stairs into the Jeep Wrangler. All the
while, she whispered encouraging words and was relatively
successful at withholding her own confused sobs.

chapter eighteen

With his hair parted in the middle and held
back with two pencils, Ben was hunched over working on the
newspaper layout while Thad answered his second phone call in as
many minutes. The first interruption was from Kate, whose presence
they awaited with a mix of dread and anticipation. Thad was
presently humoring a police dispatcher who was divulging the
innards of a late breaking scandal.

In the meantime, Ben assembled strips of
newspaper columns into rows to the beat of an old Bob Seger tune;
one way to tell if you were approaching Portnorth city limits was
to employ the radio test, which was to listen for three Seger songs
played within the space of a half an hour. Feeling reckless, Ben
took a brave drag off of Thad’s cigarette. Coughing, he stubbed out
the offensive burning cancer stick that polluted his runner’s
lungs. He returned to the newspaper, but he found himself reading
more than he was pasting.

Ben read about friendly deer wandering up to
an elderly lady’s patio and eating carrots from her out stretched
hand. She warned, “Hunters, stay away!” Then he scanned the
engagement announcements to learn a bleeding heart nurse he had
graduated with was marrying an old alcoholic abuser with five kids
from a prior union. Although slightly repulsed, he could not help
but reading more and more. There was a full-page advertisement for
the Potato Festival in a neighboring town. One year he and Vange
attended while stoned to trip out on the farm animals. She insisted
he take a picture of her cradling a piglet.

He searched the “Happy Ads” for any familiar
names and came across, “Lordy, Lordy, I’m only forty, but isn’t it
nifty my sis Nyda just turned fifty! Happy 5-0, big sis!” Ben
shuddered as he glanced down at his former home economics teacher
gazing up at him. She wore geeky glasses and was spotted with acne.
She looked as if she was in need of her weekly bath. The skeletal
Mrs. Czerwinski had inflicted the public high school with her
parochial mentality and accompanying poster of the Pope. She once
prophetically informed Ben he would never amount to anything
because of his attitude. Taking a swig of Thad’s vodka, he quickly
turned the page.

In spite himself, Ben found the
Republican-slanted Portnorth Porthole a compelling read. Each week
it quietly chronicled the lives of his friends and neighbors. The
century of back issues read like a hometown scrapbook. If he never
turned on a television or opened a daily paper, life would appear
positively Rockwellian, with no S&L scandals, murders, Iran
Contra, muggings, Bush, or crumbling former Soviet Union to speak
of. Portnorth’s crime scene amounted to B&Es, kids getting
pulled over with weed in their cars, domestic abuse and drunk
driving.

“There’s a crisis brewing at police
headquarters,” Thad said as he hung up the phone and rubbed his
sore ear. “Deputy Czerwinski was caught with his pants down in a
cop car.”

“Again? What a pig,” Ben said, rolling waxy
paste between his fingers. “Isn’t this his second offense?”

“You bet, and the last time it was in the
marina patrol boat,” Thad said laughing. “Someone reported him
earlier tonight for messing around with that Amazon police woman
down by the river. They were trapped in the backseat.”

“Will he get fired this time?”

Thad lit a cigarette. “My guess, he’ll be
suspended with pay, same as before. Compensation for his dead
daughter.”

“You know what, you’re a heartless bastard,”
Ben said, and he stepped back in order to admire his creative
newspaper page. “People mourn in all different ways.”

“Don’t quit your day job.”

Thad began dismantling Ben’s artful work. “I
wonder if Czerwinski will slap on the back brace he wears for
sympathy.”

“Hey, remember the time he pulled us over on
Main Street? We were all drunk off our asses,” Ben reminisced as he
propped himself up on a cluttered desk.

“Thank god it was an election year. That’s
when I puked all over that leather coat Nick gave you,” Thad
said.

Ben refilled their glasses. “He just gave us
a warning and let us drive home. Another close encounter with the
long arm of the law.”

As he came across the Happy Ad picture of
their home economics teacher, Thad commented,
“Nyda-the-Living-Dead.” He fixed her picture upright as Ben had
purposefully placed it upside down.

“At what age does it become pathetic to hate
and resent all authority?”

Plaster dust drifted from the ceiling and
sprinkled them with white dustiness. It was if a person had caught
on fire and was rolling across the floor above them – Stop, drop,
and roll! As they had once been instructed by Deputy Czerwinski, a
member of the VFD.

“Shit, Seth Poole and Tristana-Nanette, or
whatever the hell her name is, are really going at it, like
freaking rabbits or something,” Ben said, amazed to be dusted in
plaster. “This is so depressing, Thad. Do you always work in the
middle of the night, with other people screwing over your
head?”

Frantic pounding exploded downstairs, and
they exchanged wide-eyed looks of alarm.

“That must be Kate,” Ben said, sitting
upright.

“Go let her in.”

“You. What if she’s having a nervous
breakdown?” Ben asked uneasily. “You didn’t see her when she was
flipping out earlier. It was like she was having a seizure.”

“Just go let her up.”

“She’s your cousin, she came here to see
you.”

Thad cast him a look of annoyance. “I don’t
have time for this.”

“Me neither, it’s way past my bedtime.”

“Just tell her everything will work out fine.
Comfort her a little.”

Hesitantly, Ben descended the stairs, and he
found Kate leaning outside the front door with her fists pressed
against the glass. She looked like hell, not only was her dress
stained with mud, blood and wine, but her hair hung limply in
tangles. He approached her with cautious curiosity. She appeared
aggravated and on edge. It was as if divorce papers were pending
before the nuptial vows were even spoken.

Ben opened the large glass door, and Kate
rushed in to anchor herself against his affable familiarity.
Unsuspectingly, she had been unmoored to brave a sea of turbulence,
and he was the nearest lighthouse to navigate her to still
waters.

“Thad’s upstairs,” Ben said. With her hand
wrapped in his own, he led the way to the steps. Looking back at
her soiled dress, he asked concerned, “What happened to you?”

“Oh, Benny,” Kate said as if in physical
pain. “I can’t begin to tell you what a mess everything is.”

Slouching forward into him, Kate was dead
weight he guided toward the glowing light at the end of the
stairwell. She lacked the energy or will to ascend the rickety
steps, and her legs buckled beneath her. She collapsed, and Ben
knelt down before her to take both her hands into his own.

Sitting at the bottom of the stairs, Kate
mustered all the strength she could in order to stifle the glassy
tears brimming in her smudged eyelids. She thought about Jack and
the way he had held onto her before leaving him at the hospital.
She wondered, had it been to comfort, or to be comforted, and did
it matter? She was not sure of anything anymore. It was foolish for
her to come here thinking someone would have the answers to her
questions; besides, her search was not so much for an answer at
all, but rather to obtain a comforting shred of doubt.

Pulling her hair away from her face with both
hands, Kate whispered his name and shook her head as if all forms
of communication were futile. The haze she had been wandering in
for the past few hours dispersed and things came clearly into focus
on the brightly lit stairway. The dam broke, and all the
half-truths she had been trying to suppress flooded her
consciousness. The squalid waters of deception were muddied by
withheld half-truths and misinformation, but it no longer polluted
the innards of her brain. She could see clearly now.

Kate looked directly into Ben’s guilty almond
eyes, and she asked, “Did you know?”

As he looked away form her, every sordid
tidbit she suspected to be true was immediately confirmed. “Who all
knew, Ben – everyone?”

Kate pulled her hand free from his, and she
recoiled away in horror as she clamored halfway up the stairs. Thad
hovered above them, and Kate felt as if she was a maimed animal
trapped within a pickle of deceit. Her face wildly reflected
disbelief and revulsion; she turned back and forth, looking to and
from the benign, ineffectual strangers who held her captive for so
long with their half-hearted lies.

“Katie,” Ben pleaded, grasping the gravity of
the situation for the first time.

“You knew? You both knew at the bonfire this
afternoon at Nick’s house. You knew and said nothing?” she asked
incredulously, letting her purse drop on a step. “Did Chelsea
know?”

Struck dumb by their affirmative silence, she
backed against the wall. She kept her eyes shut as waves of tension
crashed against the hulls of her mind.

“We didn’t want to hurt you,” Ben said.

“We didn’t know if you could handle it,” Thad
added.

“Hurt me? Handle it?” Kate cried. “What do
you think I am, a child? My God, this is my future – my life! You
were content to sit back and watch me walk blindly into a sham of a
marriage – that’s what I’m finding hard to handle here. That’s what
hurts.”

“Nick loves you, Kate,” Thad said. “We’re
sorry.”

“Honestly, we’re so sorry,” Ben added.

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry here. I’m sorry
I ever thought I had a friend in either one of you,” Kate said. She
attempted to yank her purse off the steps, but it was caught on a
rusty nail. She tugged until the strap ripped, and she was sent
toppling downward. Unexpectedly, she landed at the bottom of the
stairs in Ben’s outstretched arms.

She struggled to free herself of his grasp
and said, “Let me go.” He held onto her tighter until she screamed
loudly, “Let go of me, asshole!”

Flailing wildly, she felt him tighten his
grip around her. Thad charged downwards toward them and placed a
hand firmly on her shoulder. When Kate opened her eyes, she found
herself staring directly into Ben’s dark eyes. His long eyelashes
batted with regret, and his eyes were filled with concern. She
wanted to implode with contempt, but instead she brushed her lips
against his trembling mouth, which felt like what she imagined a
girl’s mouth to feel like. His lips were soft and tender as she
crushed her mouth against him again and again until he became
passively receptive of her tongue’s forced entry.