Trying the Knot (6 page)

“Someone bring me a barf bag,” Chelsea said.
It was her favorite saying for as long as Thad remembered. With the
regularity of which she said it, one would think she was sickened
by the world and her stomach was permanently roiling.

Smiling proudly, the Italian Stallion pointed
his bloody wound at them. Everyone in the town called him Rocky,
after Rocky Balboa, ever since anyone could remember. The
pot-bellied brush cutter once belonged to a small but suspiciously
sociopathic contingency that whittled their days away in the high
school shop room.

“Tree fell on me— or my hand anyway,” Rocky
yelled, deaf from the incessant buzzing of chainsaws.

“Redneck,” Chelsea said under her breath,
smiling through her teeth.

“He’s such a Dago,” Ben said.

“Really? We’re still using derogatory racist
terms to describe ethnic origins?” Chelsea asked, cringing at the
epitaph.

A ginger-headed toddler wrapped its dirty
little arm around Rocky’s leg and stared blankly at them. The
drooling dullard’s mother was a former Miss Portnorth beauty
pageant winner, and she sat nearby glued to a sexual maintenance
discussion unfolding on Phil Donahue. She yawned and swatted the
kid away from the gawking crowd.

Thad elbowed Chelsea and whispered, “Rocky
has a nasty habit of knocking up girls from the same family. Her
sister is pregnant with his kid.”

“Make me barf, that’s so wrong.”

“It’s like a Jerry Springer episode,” Thad
said, and he added, “Vange lost her virginity to him.”

“Ok, that’s more than I needed to know,” Ben
said, and he walked away.

Chelsea imagined it was Evangelica seated on
the couch, hanging onto the grubby child rather than the washed up
queen, and she shuddered with disgust. Fixated moronically on the
elevated bandaged hand, the trio stiffly braved their way to
Vange’s room.

“Whenever I see people we graduated with, I
always feel like the same dweeb I was back in high school,” Thad
said. “It’s as if the last five years of my life become a
nonexistent wasteland.”

“What’re you talking about?” Ben asked.

“The past five years of my life have been a
nonexistent wasteland,” Chelsea insisted, and she wrapped her arms
around her compact frame. “I knew college wasn’t going to be all
I’d hoped when my roommate turned out to be a six foot model. Then
at my first Womyns Space meeting, I discovered I’d lost my
virginity during a date rape. It was all downhill from there.”

“Like they say – the higher the pedestal, the
further the fall,” Thad said.

Ben nudged Thad and rolled his eyes. Thad was
glad his own wasted high school career culminated in his having
been voted Most Likely to be Forgotten. Unlike Chelsea, he longed
to obliterate any memories of being a teenager, and he only had
profuse gratitude that the whole horrible ordeal was behind him. He
was still waiting for glory days to pass him by as if they had not
already skipped over him.

Lagging behind, Thad watched Chelsea
interrogate Ben.

“Did she leave a note?”

“Nope,” Ben lied. He felt for the scrap of
paper nestled in the watch pocket of his faded black jeans.

“Listen, I find it rather unbelievable that,
in her last hours, Evangelica was speechless,” Chelsea said
doubtfully. “What did she overdose on?”

“Sleeping pills,” Ben said as they neared
Vange’s room.

“Prescription or over the counter?”

“Does it really matter? Ordinary ones, I
think.”

“You know, it takes fifty Seconal to kill
yourself,” Thad said. They stopped outside the closed hospital
door, and he continued animatedly, “If I were going to off myself,
I’d buy a whole bunch of heroin and check into a dingy hotel and
just lay around in my underwear, all sweaty and gross, bleeding
from my pin cushion arms. I’d keep injecting the heroin until I
finally choked on my own vomit.”

Sickened, Chelsea sucked in the sterile
ethanol hospital stench and flashed him a look of pure disgust as
if she were about to wretch. “Gross, make me barf.”

“Given it much thought, have you?” Ben asked,
equally revolted. “That’s so sick, man.”

“Ha, psych,” Thad said, but he was the only
one laughing.

The door to Evangelica’s room swung open, and
to their surprise they waded into a river of muffled giggles. The
nervous laughter ceased when the culprits of joy realized Ben,
Chelsea, and Thad’s presence. Acting as if they had been caught
executing a mischievous prank, Kate’s father and Vange’s mother let
go of one another’s hand. Ed and Shayla looked as if they had only
recently crawled out of bed after a late night binge at the local
tavern. Ed possessed a hollow confidence punctuated by an
ill-fitting cowboy hat, and Shayla’s bloodshot eyes reflected
world-weariness as hardened as her Aqua Net encrusted hairdo.

The three visitors were speechless as they
struggled to find an appropriate response to minimize the momentary
awkwardness. Shayla focused on the ceiling and Ed Hesse stepped
forward. He shook their hands and thanked them for coming as if
they had boarded his freighter for a cruise around the Great Lakes.
His sailing career had peaked on his having become chief engineer
on a Great Lakes freighter; he was accustomed to wresting control
of stormy situations at sea.

“Hello, there,” Chief Hesse bellowed.

“Hello, Chief,” Ben said.

“Has there been any change?” Chelsea
asked.

Shayla shook her head and leaned heavily
against her sturdy husband. She lovingly placed a hand on his big
belly.

“Nick’s here now,” Ed announced, “he’ll see
to it our girls are well taken care of.”

“From what I’ve seen already, he’s a real
miracle worker,” Thad said.

Shayla nodded and pressed her face into Ed’s
thick tattooed bicep. Ed ignored his nephew, and he informed the
trio they were hosting an afternoon barbeque at their cottage. Ben,
Chelsea and Thad were more than welcome to join in the festivities,
which were being hosted for the sake of the various out-of-town
guests – mainly a mess of cousins and the wedding attendants, which
were mostly made up of Nick’s fraternity brothers and Kate’s ragtag
gaggle of gal pals.

Ed promised, “A fun time will be had by
all.”

“We’ll see,” Ben said.

“Forgive us if we’re no-shows,” Thad said.
“You know how it is when tragedy rears its ugly head.”

Chelsea hit him in the arm and extended her
sympathies to Shayla. Despite the fact she never prayed, Chelsea
informed them Evangelica would be in their prayers. Then the oddly
contented couple walked away and waited until safely turning the
corner to resume holding hands. It was as if they were Kenny Rogers
and Dottie West cast as Romeo and Juliet, wallowing in a
star-crossed love affair.

Ben, Chelsea and Thad cautiously ventured
inside Vange’s hospital room where they found Nick standing guard
next to Kate. She sat slumped in a chair alongside a dangerously
archaic looking mechanical bed, and it became obvious a nurse must
have convinced her to swallow a sedative. Dazed and confused, it
appeared she was going to slip into a coma next to Vange.

They silently gathered around. An IV stuck
into Vange’s forearm, along with various other tubes poking and
prodding her. Her usual undaunted disposition lay buried behind her
closed eyes. Evangelica looked listless and peaceful as if she were
swaddled in a casket, rather than hospital bedding. Her wavy,
auburn hair spilled over her pale cheeks onto an unnaturally
starched pillow.

Ben brushed her hair away from her
luminescent face, and he placed the back of his hand on her
forehead as if checking whether or not she had a fever. He was the
only one who had the courage to touch her. Her ordinarily painted,
pouty mouth was clamped shut. How strange, to be in the same room
with Vange and not be subjugated by a barrage of witty anecdotal
stories. Her lips were absent of their usual matte red lipstick.
The curtain had momentarily fallen on her dramatic antics.

The overwhelming silence so unnerved them the
mere act of the sun disappearing behind the clouds was jarring.
They held their breaths while the crisp white room was transformed
into a pale shade of gray. The beeping monitor was the only sound
penetrating the gloomy quiet.

Kate involuntarily drooped forward. Her head
rolled to one side and rested against Nick. Fighting the sedative,
she groggily attempted to sit up straight, and Nick wrapped a
protective arm around her. As Nick observed each of them, his
steady gaze contained a knowing integrity. His plethora of life
experience allowed him to look most people in the eye with
unflinching empathy and occasional sadness. Indeed, it was the rare
occasion he ever came across as insincere or duplicitous.

When the sun reappeared, Chelsea broke the
spell of taciturn stillness. “So, you found her in bed, Benjamin –
without a note or anything?”

“Yes, she was just laying there like she was
asleep,” Ben said. He clasped her limp hand with his tan fingers.
“There were pills bottles next to her. I just put two and two
together.”

“Well, lucky for us, you can add,” Chelsea
said and flashed a wry smile.

“Still, couldn’t it have been an accident?”
Nick asked. Simultaneously, the three of them flashed him a look of
doubtful finality, which forced him to abandon that tired
theory.

Before the room once again lapsed into
death-laden silence, Chelsea asked, “Whatever compelled you to pay
her a visit at six in the morning, Benjamin?”

“It was a wake up call, that’s all,” Ben
explained, and he set her hand down. “We do it all the time – when
one of us has to wake up early, we drag the other out of bed to
make breakfast.”

“So it’s safe to say you went hungry this
morning,” Chelsea said.

“I—I don’t understand why,” Kate interjected,
with her glassy eyes nearly shut. “I just don’t understand, why
she’d do such a thing, especially now.”

“Maybe we’ll never know,” Nick said. His
bland diplomacy did not allow him to be in the presence of any type
of turmoil, and his most convenient method of alleviating tension
was to charm the source into captivated submission.

“Maybe the answer is right before our eyes,”
Thad said. He removed himself from the bedside vigil and made it a
point to move out of reach of the benign spell Nick’s presence cast
over the room.

Hovering protectively near Kate, Nick was so
engulfed in his own obligatory vigil he barely noticed Vange
sprawled before them ineffably vulnerable and comatose. Nick
flashed Thad a questioning glance and asked, “What’s that supposed
to mean? You know something we don’t?”

Thad shook his head. “Maybe the explanation
is more obvious than we think.”

“Like she was depressed?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, something like that.”

Ben stepped away from Vange’s bedside, and he
pointed out, “Vange wouldn’t ever kill herself if she was
depressed. She spent most of her life depressed. If anything, she
would do it when stoked and manic.”

“Really?” Chelsea asked doubtfully.

“She always said when she went, she wanted to
go happy.”

“Like I said, maybe we’ll never know,” Nick
repeated uneasily.

“It’s a little too soon to stop asking
questions,” Chelsea said. She walked over to Kate and placed a
protective hand on her shoulder. “Nick, you should put Katherine to
bed.”

“I’m fine,” Kate insisted sleepily. She was
so subdued that even the slightest breeze might topple her from the
chair.

“Take her back to my mother’s house. It’s
absolutely empty, and you’re more than welcome to rest in the guest
bedroom,” Chelsea said. “Most of Kate’s stuff is there anyway.”

Kate had spent last night at Ginny Norris’s
house. In an effort to avoid her father and stepmother, she
traveled elusively between Chelsea’s mom’s and Nick’s parents’
houses. Nick agreed it seemed like the most logical option, and he
helped a wearily drugged Kate onto her feet. She rested her head
against his shoulder, closed her heavy brown eyes and proceeded as
if sleepwalking through a bad dream. Nick guided them from the
room, but not before Ben leaned over and gave Evangelica’s
oblivious hand a gentle goodbye squeeze.

With the greatest of care, Nick helped ease
Kate into the passenger seat of his Jeep Wrangler. Before driving
away, he waved gravely at Ben and Chelsea. Lagging behind and
smoking as usual, Thad suggested the three of them grab breakfast.
They were not quite ready to abandon the fragile network of support
that had sprung up between them. He offered to drive Chelsea, and
Ben rode his motorcycle.

Once settled in the putrid car, Chelsea shook
her head and was dismayed to discover there was only an AM/FM
radio. It was set to Silver 96.7, and she joked it was the age of
the average listener. Harry Connick, Jr. crooned while Thad
struggled to start the car. Plucking a few gum wrappers off her
seat, Chelsea asked, “What do you think he is hiding?”

“It’s not like Nick to keep secrets.”

“I mean Benjamin.”

“What could he possibly be keeping from
us?”

“I have no idea, Thaddeus, but I don’t trust
him. Not at all.”

“Is it because he’s in love with her?”

Shocked and dismayed, Chelsea asked, “Is he
really? Still, after all these years?”

“I think so.”

“But she’s getting married tomorrow!”

“No, not Kate. I think he’s in love with
Vange,” Thad said. “But I’m not sure he even realizes it.”

The rusted out, brown Datsun chugged to life,
and it roared so loudly conversation was pointless. The car hacked
and sputtered its way from the hospital to the diner across
town.

chapter four

“Didn’t her father kill himself?” Chelsea
asked.