Our Lady Chaos, page 29
part #5 of Bloodletter Series
“Is that why you ran away?”
“What you think?” Eddie winced at the acrimony in his voice, and again, the line hissed with silence.
“Was it your uncle?”
“Who else?”
“I dunno. I thought maybe…Jack’s family…”
Eddie laughed—he couldn’t help it. “Jack barely even knows my name. I doubt his family even knows I’m alive.”
Chief Morton cleared his throat, and it came across the line with the bluster of an artillery barrage. “Well, perhaps. I bet Jack’s family knows your name after the other day.”
A smile slid across Eddie’s face. “Yeah.”
The chief cleared his throat again, and Eddie winced at the volume. “You remember when you ran away the first time? When I told you that all you ever had to do was tell me your uncle Gil was up to no good and that I would help?”
Eddie smile died stillborn. “Yeah.”
“Son, why didn’t… I said I would help. All you had to do was say something.”
Eddie sighed, and this time he was the one sending the artillery barrage. “Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you… With all that I know, this isn’t the first time he’s tuned up on you if my guess is right. Why didn’t you tell me?” Chief Morton sounded more than a little hurt.
Again, Eddie sighed. “I did, Chief Morton. Not in so many words…hell, maybe not with words at all, but I did tell you. I told you on that day…that day when you came to tell me my dad killed my mom.” Behind him, Bonnie Quinlan, the town’s dispatcher, gasped. “I told you that day I ran away, I told you in the car the other day. I told you, and I told you, but you didn’t listen to me.”
The silence stretched, punctuated by the hisses and pops of the phone line. “I didn’t understand, Eddie. I didn’t catch what you meant. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” sighed Eddie. “I know.”
“Eddie, I need you to tell me now. I need you to use words and tell me all of it. Tell me about your aunt, tell me about you.”
“Chief, I don’t want—”
“You have to, Eddie. You must be explicit. I need you to tell me everything.”
“Why? It won’t help. Nothing helps.” The blackness inside him threatened to overwhelm him, and his eyes burned with unshed tears.
PUSH IT BACK! I have to PUSH IT BACK!
“This will help, Eddie. I promise. I will help you. It will end.”
“How?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, son. I’m sitting at my desk back in Cottonwood Vale. On the blotter in front of me, I have an arrest warrant. At the top of it is the name ‘Gilbert Ratherson.’ All I need to execute it is the details, Eddie, and a judge’s signature. You give them to me, and I’ll make sure you never see Gil again.”
Even though Gil was a bastard, a lump formed in Eddie’s throat. “I don’t—”
“Trust me, Eddie. This is the right thing to do.”
The chief had never lied to him. Every time they’d spoken, Eddie had walked away feeling stronger. John Morton felt more like a relative—a grandfather—than Gil ever had. Eddie nodded to himself.
He told Chief Morton everything.
At the end of the story, Chief Morton grunted. “I’m sorry, son. I should never have left it go this long. I should have—”
“I should’ve told you. With words.”
The line popped and hissed for a moment, and then Chief Morton coughed. “Well, let’s leave it that we both should have done something other than what we did. In a minute, I’m going to ask you to give the phone back to Officer Quinlan. Then I want you to take it easy, to rest. I’ll come after you myself, but I’ve got to get the warrant taken care of first. So, you just rest and wait for old John.”
“My auntie Margo—”
“Don’t you worry, Eddie. I’ll tell her you’re okay. She’ll see you soon enough, anyway.” Chief Morton cleared his throat, but this time, he covered the receiver with his hand. “Now, hand the phone back to Officer Quinlan.”
Eddie started to comply but then put the phone back to his ear. “Chief?”
“Yeah, Eddie?”
“It’s…it’s about my auntie Margo…” Eddie wound down, unsure of what to say next.
“Yeah?”
“Well, you said I should tell you.”
“Has she been hitting you, too?”
“No, nothing like that. But…she knew. She knew what Gil was doing, and she let him do it. She—”
“Eddie, listen to me, now. Your auntie Margo is as much one of Gil’s victims as you are. She’s been with him a long time. Something happens to a woman—hell, to anyone—when they’re subjected to systematic, long-term abuse. It’s as if their will erodes. They know it’s not right, but they lose the ability to fight back, to do anything other than what their abuser tells them to do.”
“Really?” Eddie was as close to dissolving in tears as he had been since his parents died.
“Yes, Eddie. I’ve seen it time and time again.”
“Then… So, Margo didn’t help me because she couldn’t?”
“That’s right, she couldn’t. Gil beat that part of her into submission first, or else she’d have clocked him with an iron or a frying pan.”
“Oh,” whispered Eddie.
“She loves you, son. Things will be different once Gil is in prison. Trust me, okay?”
“Okay,” mumbled Eddie.
“Okay. Now go ahead and hand the phone back to Officer Quinlan, please.”
Eddie bobbed his head and handed the phone to Quinlan. He sank back in his chair, half-listening to Quinlan’s side of the conversation but thinking about what Chief Morton had said for the most part.
He thought about all the times Margo had tried to rein Uncle Gil in, the look on her face when Gil shot her a glare or offered to discuss it with her in private. Eddie thought about how her face would blanch to the point she looked as if she were on the verge of fainting.
Quinlan put his hand over the receiver. “Bonnie? Do we still have film for the Polaroid?”
“Yes. I picked a box up from the drugstore the other day.”
“Chief Morton wants us to document the boy’s injuries. Can you bring the Polaroid in here and take pictures of this boy’s face?”
“Of course, I can.”
Eddie closed his eyes and pretended he was somewhere else while the Polaroid snapped and clicked and spit pictures out into Bonnie’s hand.
“Don’t worry, son,” the woman crooned. “You’ll be back in your family’s loving embrace soon enough.”
But it hadn’t happened that way at all.
Thank God for small favors.
3
1986
The campus was huge, and Eddie loved it. But he didn’t love the sick feeling in his stomach every time he thought about the tuition, the books, the meal plan, and the required freshman housing. The Morton’s didn’t have a ton of money, and both the Chief and Mrs. Morton had told him not to worry about it, but still.
He stood with his backpack hanging from one shoulder, his head tilted back, the rays of the sun caressing his cheeks. It felt good—no, scratch that; it felt great. Ninety-seven miles separated him from Cottonwood Vale, and that made Eddie smile—except when he missed his step-parents.
The distance was one of his most substantial reasons for going to college. If he didn’t, he’d have gotten stuck there in Cottonwood Vale, working a menial job—at the grocery store or the feed and tack—and he’d see them all the time.
He didn’t want that. He never wanted to see Gil or Margo again. Unbidden, the memory of going “home” after the chief arrested Gil came flooding back.
Margo had been so angry. Livid. Spitting mad. She had screamed at Eddie the moment he came through the door. Cursed at him. She was furious that Eddie had told on Gil because Gil was going to prison.
Chief Morton had stood behind him, with one hand on his shoulder, his face a study in incomprehension. Without saying a word, he had turned Eddie around and taken him back out to the car. He hadn’t said a word as he started the car and drove away from Gil and Margo’s farm, but when he pulled into the driveway of a white clapboard house on the other side of town, he’d told Eddie not to worry, to put Margo and Gil out of his mind.
That was how he’d come to live with John Morton and his wife, Izzy. They treated him as the grandson they’d never had—their only son had died in Vietnam. They’d raised him like family, provided everything he needed and more.
Margo had been so vindictive… She’d sold his parents’ house two weeks after Gil’s conviction and transfer to the Gowanda Correctional Facility. She’d never given a dime to the Mortons for Eddie’s care. As far as Eddie knew, she never even asked about him. She’d sold everything in the house. Of course she had. She called it an “estate sale,” even though Eddie was alive and well.
Gil had gotten out of prison two months before the day Eddie left for college. It seemed beating your nephew to a pulp wasn’t that big of a deal to the Department of Corrections. He was “rehabilitated.”
Sure he was.
It seemed Margo didn’t consider it a big deal, either, as she allowed Gil to move back into the farmhouse. John said he’d expected it, that Margo hadn’t had enough yet.
With a sigh, he put the thoughts of Gil and Margo away, shoving both the memories and the emotions that came with them into that empty, purpose-built hole he kept inside himself.
He was excited about the upcoming year. It was an opportunity he’d never imagined he’d have. He had no idea what he wanted to do yet, what he wanted to study, or even what he was interested in majoring in, but the course catalog was chock full of classes that looked fun. The only required class in his first quarter was a class called Freshman Orientation, and if he didn’t get a move on, he’d never make it across campus in time for the first meeting.
With a smile on his face and a full, confident stride, Eddie set out from the dorm, traversing the “Brick Mile”—a long, straight sidewalk bordered by brick buildings. Even the sidewalk had an inlay of bricks in the middle, laid in a herringbone pattern. The buildings, the inlays in the pavement, all of them contained the same color red with the same bone-colored mortar gluing them all together.
It followed a long, straight line all the way from the dorms to the administration building in the dead center of the campus. He didn’t think the Brick Mile would be much fun during the frequent fall windstorms and winter blizzards, but in early September, he enjoyed the walk.
He walked with his head up, smiling at other students going the other way. It struck him as weird, to smile at all the strangers, but college made Eddie happy. Not that the Mortons hadn’t made him happy, they had…but to express happiness in public, that was something new.
He didn’t know anyone at the school, but that had been another of his main criteria for picking a school. He hadn’t had many friends at Robert Jackson High School back in Cottonwood Vale. His friendship with Pete Paulson had faded after their freshman year—not out of any animus, their schedules just had nothing in common.
His relationship with Melanie Fox, on the other hand, had lasted throughout school. He’d taken her to senior prom, driving Mrs. Morton’s Oldsmobile Delta Eighty-Eight, but Melanie hadn’t minded that at all. In fact, she’d enjoyed the back seat after the dance. And so had he.
Melanie had made it clear she expected their relationship to last through college, and perhaps the rest of their lives. And to be honest, Eddie had given it significant consideration, but Melanie didn’t have the grades for college, and more to the point, the Fox family was dirt-poor, and Melanie didn’t have anyone to pay her way as the Mortons did for him. Instead of starting college that September, Melanie had started her third month working at the knife factory in Franklinville.
It had hurt her when Eddie had told her he wanted to be “free to experience college life.” He’d seen the pain in her eyes, but she hadn’t cried. Her three and a half years of dating Eddie had taught her he didn’t respond well to negative emotions. They drove him into “his cold place,” as she put it. The pain had floated in her eyes for a few moments, but then she’d forced a smile to her lips, and after another few moments, the smile had reached her eyes too.
Eddie shook his head to clear those memories from his mind as well. She’d given him the opportunity to experience college life, and he would take it.
He had a chance at a new start. No one at the college knew him as “that poor boy whose father murdered his mother and then hung himself in the garage,” nor “that poor boy whose uncle beat him half to death.” Eddie’s smile stretched wider at the reality of his anonymity.
He walked on, gripping one strap of his backpack, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his face, just one more face in the crowd of young people traversing the Brick Mile. Chief Morton had taught him ways to meet people. They’d done a lot of role-playing, a lot of pretending they’d never met.
Eddie hoped the preparation would pay dividends. His track record in the making-friends department stank like a pig farm.
He made it to class with a few minutes to spare and took a seat in the middle of the room. A few students had arrived as early as Eddie, including a stunning brunette who sat at the front of the class, tapping her pen against her thumbnail. He wondered what her name was.
Two minutes before the scheduled start of class, a skinny man wearing sandals, shorts, and a black T-shirt came in and walked to the podium. He didn’t look old enough to be a professor to Eddie.
The class filled up in those last few minutes until a freshman sat in every seat. To Eddie’s left sat a guy who reminded him so much of Jack McGregor that Eddie turned in his chair, putting his shoulder and back between himself and the guy on his left.
That gave him a better view of the girl sitting to his right. She also wore shorts and sandals, but unlike the professor, she wore them as though she owned the very idea of them. She had long, tan legs, Kool-Aid red hair that gleamed in the classroom lights, and startling green eyes that made him want to faint when she glanced at him, and a smile crooked her lips.
No time like the present to try out what John taught me, Eddie thought. God hates a coward. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, the girl leaned toward him.
“That guy’s too young to be the professor, right?” she whispered.
Eddie grinned. “I just thought the same thing. How old do you suppose he is?”
She darted a glance at the man behind the podium, and her hair shimmered as it moved. “No idea. Late twenties?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Eddie turned his attention back to her. “My name’s Eddie.” The girl was a knockout—all except the hair. It reminded him of something he’d seen somewhere, but he couldn’t recall what, except that it made him nervous.
“Well, hello, Eddie. My name’s Amanda. Are you a freshman here?”
Eddie chuckled and nodded. “Freshman Orientation, remember?”
Amanda blushed and dipped her head. “Oh yeah,” she murmured. “Real ditz move, huh?”
Eddie chuckled. “Don’t worry about it, Amanda. Happens to the best of us. I just asked someone in the hallway outside my dorm room if he went to school here.”
Amanda laughed, and it was a beautiful laugh. “No, you didn’t,” she said. “But I appreciate the effort to make me feel better.”
“No, I did,” said Eddie, grinning.
Amanda laughed again and reached across the space between their two desks and patted his hand. “You’re sweet, Eddie.”
That made it Eddie’s turn to blush.
The guy at the front of the class cleared his throat and tapped the podium. “If I can have your attention, please,” he said.
“Oh my God, he sounds just like Michael J. Fox,” whispered Amanda, putting a hand over her mouth to stifle her giggle.
Eddie had never liked Family Ties, so he didn’t think he could discern Michael J. Fox’s voice from Michael Jackson’s, but Amanda was cute, so following that age-old male-female calculus, he nodded and smiled.
“My name is Professor Keaton.” The professor paused as if he expected something to happen, and after a few moments, the class erupted in laughter. The professor flashed a lopsided smile at them and raised his hand. “Okay, so now we have the obligatory Michael J. Fox joke out of the way. My real name is Andy Jackson, and that isn’t a joke.” He smiled at the class, revealing brilliant white teeth. “Welcome to your Freshman Orientation. Why don’t you take a minute and greet the students sitting around you?”
Eddie didn’t turn to his left. Instead, he grinned at Amanda and held out his hand. She slid her dry palm across his and smiled back.
And that was all it took.
That day marked the start of the relationship that would bring him to the verge of flunking out that first quarter. He spent a lot of time with her, hanging out in the common area of the girls’ dorm, and when she had something else she had to do, he’d spent most of his time day-dreaming about her. She captivated him, ensorcelled him, so much so he found it hard to breathe in her presence.
It hadn’t been that way with Melanie. Not even close. Things with Melanie had been…cooler, less immediate. There was nothing wrong with Melanie—she was a great girl, and she loved Eddie a lot…
But she was no Amanda.
Except for Freshman Orientation, Eddie’s classes were a snooze fest most of the time, and most of his professors were old—thirty-five or forty—and did not understand how the real world worked. Most of them had never suffered through a bad day in their lives.
Eddie couldn’t see the point in learning English grammar or American History or Algebra. He couldn’t imagine a future in which he would need any of those things. He relished his computer class, however—at least the parts of it that taught him about writing programs. Eddie didn’t think all the algorithms and all that other bullshit had much value—not in the real world—but he enjoyed being able to make the computer do what he wanted it to do. And last, but by far the worst, Art Appreciation and History… A worthless class, to his way of thinking.
