Trying the Knot (38 page)

“Oh, please,” she erupted, “spare me!”

Chelsea drove her car through the blinking
red light and pulled over to the side of the road. “Get out if you
want. Go find her by yourself. I’m sick of pretending I care what
happens to either one of you. You should’ve called one of your
idiotic frat brothers to drive you all over God’s creation looking
for your runaway bride.”

“I don’t believe you. You have serious
issues, have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?”

She put the car in park next to the newspaper
building and smacked her palms against the steering wheel. “Oh
yeah, I’m the one who’s crazy. I can’t believe Vange would consider
killing herself over the likes of you. What a waste.”

“More kind words,” he observed. She was like
a bottomless pit of nastiness.

More and more, California looked like an
attractive getaway plan. She could not wait for the wedding to be
over with, simply for the fact that she would never have to see any
of them ever again. She sighed exhausted, and said, “Just get out,
Nick. You don’t want to be in this car anymore than I want you in
it.”

Pointing to a lone vehicle in the supermarket
parking lot, Nick said, “There’s the Jeep.”

Nick bolted from the car and jogged across
the pavement hoping for a sort of clue as to Kate’s whereabouts.
Chelsea turned off the Malibu ignition and joined him in the barren
lot. The hood of the Jeep reflected a portion of the large
illuminated sign that spelled out Foodliner in red letters.
Whenever Chelsea saw the sign, she always repeated to herself one
of Thad’s more unforgettable mantras, “What the fuck is a Foodliner
anyway?”

Nick inspected the empty vehicle as if he
would find Kate sitting behind the wheel mindlessly gazing up at
the Foodliner sign. While he hopelessly scanned the area, Chelsea
suggested, “Maybe she walked down to the beach.”

“What would she be doing there?”

“I don’t know, maybe she’d rather take a long
walk off a short pier rather than marry you.”

Nick glanced up at the three-story newspaper
building. It was the oldest and tallest structure in town, and a
blinking haze glowed from the large attic windows. He walked toward
the main entrance of the Portnorth Porthole.

Chelsea remained behind soaking up the
desolation emanating from her wet surroundings. She had not yet
left the city limits, but she was already feeling nostalgic for her
lakeside hometown, which was more hell than hamlet these days.
Hopeful, she could not help but think at twenty-three years old,
she was at the end of something along with the rest of them.
Morning in America had been a wildly successful political slogan of
her youth, and the market-tested optimism was drummed into her head
at the end of what was considered a national malaise. But morning
had lingered too long and lasted all day, and an unremarkable dusk
slipped away into an indistinguishable nighttime. Her youth had
been spent clinging to false promises of a better tomorrow
ornamented with snarky irony parading as wisdom.

Boiling inside of her was a reduction of rage
and disappointment, voiceless and forgotten like a mute offspring
tucked away in an attic. She hoped that tomorrow, the day of the
wedding was rainy as well; moreover, she hoped for an Indian summer
flood to rinse away everything and everyone littering her near
perfect existence.

Inside the newspaper building, Thad hovered
halfway down the stairs debating what he should do. Furious
knocking created a disturbance at the front entrance while Kate
melded herself into Ben. Her fingers dug their way into his
shoulders and throat as she smashed herself against him. Ben
inhaled all of her wet hungry mouth into his own while her nails
blazed searing trails over his chest. She writhed against his body
and clutched onto his long black hair and smothered his face
against her small breasts.

Ceaseless hammering echoed in her aching
head, and she automatically assumed it was the mounting pressure
beating mercilessly against her brain ever since Evangelica landed
in a comatose state.

Kate wrapped both her legs around his middle
and pulled his face to her chest, with his shocked mouth between
her breasts. The frantic banging only grew louder and more intense.
In the frenzied moment, Ben struggled to place her feet down on the
floor. But she was equally intent on wrapping herself around him as
she muffled his protests with her Pez-like mouth.

From the corner of his eye, Ben watched Nick
pounding away on the front door. With overwhelming rage, his face
contorted with violence as he beat his fist against the glass door.
Kate struggled to remove Ben’s shirt, which was caught on the
silvery chair around his neck while the glass door rattled so
loudly it threatened to shake from its hinges if it did not first
smash to bits. Growing unsteady, Ben strained to support Kate on
his aching thighs as she wriggled against him full of a desire
possessed by revenge. They fell onto the floor in a dizzy
whirl-spin.

Kneeling across Ben’s middle, Kate remained
seemingly oblivious to the situation imploding around her as she
grappled to free him from the confines of his T-shirt, which read
“T2: Judgment Day” across the front. With the stairs finally
unobstructed, Thad bounded downwards and whizzed past them in the
direction of the battered door. Tangled up in his shirt, Ben
blindly felt an ominous shock of fresh air against his bare abdomen
as Nick’s bellow of inhuman rage echoed throughout the room.

Nick hurled angrily past Thad, and Chelsea
followed close behind. She yelled after him, “Calm down, Nicholas,
before you do something else you’ll regret.”

Standing at the open door, Thad contemplated
whether he should call the police, but he could not decide who
posed a bigger threat: Nick or Kate? In one fell swoop, Nick
plucked Kate off of Ben’s waist and gently tossed her aside. She
landed near the customer service counter where she remained
crouched and hyperventilating.

Blinded by his shirt, which bound his hands
over his head, Ben lay prone and shaking on the floor as he endured
a kick to the ribs. In order to visualize the blows being delivered
to his chest, he struggled to get up on his feet. Nick
sympathetically grabbed the shirt and tore it off, freeing Ben from
his straight-jacket-like constraints. Nick landed his first punch
between Ben’s pierced nipples and Ben gasped as Nick pelted him
across the jaw.

“Stop it,” Chelsea screamed at the top of her
lungs. “Stop, or you’ll kill him!” She ran to Nick and clung to his
arm, but he merely shook her loose while she kicked at his
shins.

“I can’t believe this,” Nick said. Mad as all
hell, he lurched closer to Ben. “You turn me away, when I need your
help most – so you can come here and fuck my wife!”

From a safe distance, Thad piped in, “You
have it wrong, Nick, that’s not the way it was.”

“And she isn’t even your wife yet,” Ben
added. He rubbed his sore jaw and staggered backwards.

“She might as well be,” Nick said, pointing
at Kate on the floor.

Soon they were locked in a near-death
struggle, with Ben experiencing most of the death. Trying to force
him to see reason, Chelsea leapt up on Nick’s back and pounded her
fists against his shoulders as she held onto the nape of his neck.
Thad stepped up to the three interlocked beasts and attempted to
pry them apart. Ben and Nick finally separated on their own accord,
out of breath and weary. However, Chelsea remained perched on
Nick’s back with her hands gripped around his neck. If capable, she
would strangle him with all her might. Nick attempted to shrug her
off of his back, but her legs were wrapped around his waist. He
tried to pry her fingers from his neck, but they would not
budge.

“Get this crazy bitch off of me,” Nick
ordered, “before I trip and fall and crush her to death.”

Ben and Thad reached for the back of her arms
and pulled her off Nick. He unhooked her feet, which were
interlocked around his groin, and they struggled to disentangle
her. Finally, Chelsea found herself held confined between Thad and
Ben. When they released her, she attempted to shove Nick away from
them, but he pushed her backwards into Ben, who fell against Thad,
who nearly tumbled over.

“You’re lucky I don’t hurt you,” Nick said to
Ben, his eyes reflected confusion and his voice crackled with
betrayal.

“It’s not as if you’ve been able to so far,”
Ben said, and he looked around for Kate, but she was nowhere in
sight.

“Where’s Katherine?” Chelsea vocalized their
concern. She rubbed her sore arms, which would be bruised by
morning.

Thad ascended the stairs two at a time, and
he scanned the newspaper layout room. Lighting a cigarette, he
called down, “She’s not up here.”

Nick cracked his sore knuckles and shook his
hand, which hurt from connecting with such force against Ben’s
chest. Ever chivalrous, Nick swiped his rival’s shirt up from off
the floor and threw it at him.

“She must’ve left during the fight,” Chelsea
said unnecessarily, and she made her way to the glass front
door.

Ben inspected his ripped T-shirt, and he felt
his throat to make sure the silvery-blue necklace had not been lost
during the scuffle.

Chelsea returned from outside and announced,
“The Jeep is still here.”

“And her purse,” Thad said, holding it up.
“Maybe she spontaneously combusted.”

“I know where she could be,” Ben offered,
sticking his arm through the gaping tear in his shirt.

“And where might that be?” Nick asked. He was
annoyed by Ben’s claiming to know where his future wife had run off
to, especially when he had not the slightest idea. “Where?”

“I bet anything she went back to the
hospital,” Ben said, and he watched Nick rush toward the door. Then
he taunted lying, “Hey, Nick, even if me and Kate would have done
it right here on this floor, it wouldn’t have been the first
time.”

“You sonofabitch,” Nick uttered, charging at
Ben, nearly knocking Chelsea over in the process.

Nick reached out to grab Ben by the neck, and
he ripped the chain from his throat. After bowling him over
backwards onto the floor, Nick knelt across his middle and aimed a
clenched fist at Ben’s face. Ben squinted and contorted with fear
as he tried to writhe away. But rather than delivering the
deathblow he was surely capable of, Nick slapped his open palm
forcefully against Ben’s forehead and pushed his skull into the
floor.

Turning away, Nick said resolutely, “You’re
not even worth the effort.”

After Ben spat between Nick’s eyes, the last
thing Ben registered was Chelsea’s shrill shriek and a popping
sensation in the middle of his face that sent a stream of blood
gushing down the front him while simultaneously seeping in the back
of his throat. He never had any idea what a broken nose felt like
until now.

chapter nineteen

part iii – don’t dream it’s over

Thad staggered through the narrow kitchen
while swiping his bangs away from his face. The silver necklace was
entwined in his fingers, and the rhinoceros charm dangled
hypnotically before his sunken eyes. As he made his way through the
dysfunctional galley kitchen, a mere hallway, it occurred to Thad
he had never really liked the house he grew up in. But it was not
to keep him from coming back.

“Um, where have you been?” demanded his
sister, who sat at one end of the oversized dining room table. Bent
over, lacing up her suede boots, she looked as if she were
embarking on a midnight mountain stroll. The wrought iron
chandelier dimly illuminated and softened her features.

“I’ve been working, you know that,” Thad
pointed out, nonplussed by her agitated state.

“Screw you.”

“And greetings to you, too.” He stuffed the
necklace into the front pocket of his khakis.

“Sweet-ass job, dropout.”

“You even apply to any schools yet? I got my
BA remember, a degree in English? Christ, does everyone think I’m a
drop out?”

“What the hell college graduate would come
back to this hellhole?”

“Where you going?”

“I was coming to get you. We have to find
mom.”

“What?”

“Mom thought dad was flirting with skank slut
Shayla at the bar, so she ran out and fell down the steps. Then
brain-dead asshole watched her climb into a stranger’s car before
going back in for last call,” Alexa explained irritated. She put on
a fake fur coat that was clearly too small for her.

“So, mom is passed out in a stranger’s car,
and dad is getting drunk with Uncle Ed’s new wife?”

“He says he wasn’t. But when he finally left,
mom was gone – and she has like 800 dollars in her purse.”

“Wow, she could be halfway to Canada.”

“I hate pay day.”

“Where’s dad now?”

“He’s out looking for her in the station
wagon,” Alexa said, walking away. She yelled from the back door,
“Hurry up, Thaddeus! I’m tired, and I’ve got to stand up in that
stupid wedding tomorrow.”

Thad thought it sounded like the wedding from
hell. The groom screws the bride’s stepsister who then attempts
suicide; it was a Jerry Springer episode.

He tossed her the keys. “Maybe you should
drive.”

“You’re drunk!” She raged, “You pickled
motherfucker.”

“It’s not like I’m wasted or anything. I only
had a few drinks at work,” he said with a shrug.

“Good thing you inherited the alcoholic gene,
not me.”

She was out the backdoor, and he said to no
one, “Who knows, our real mothers could be drunks too.”

Thad fell into the decrepit Datsun, and Alexa
mumbled a flood of obscenities until the engine finally sputtered
to life. His fingers sifted through the trash at his feet until he
found a crumpled pack of Camels. Stale smoke wafted from the
cigarette, and he decided it was surreal they should be combing
sleeping neighborhoods for their inebriated mother.