Chapter Twenty-Four
Doe
Gone was the boy next door. With that last kiss he’d been replaced with the monster from my memory. That kiss brought it all flooding back and, what I saw, shook me to my very bones. “I’ll run to my house and grab the truck. I’ll meet you out front, on your porch in say, thirty minutes?”
“Thirty minutes. Yes,” I nodded. With a little wave I turned and jogged up to the house, practically falling again, this time over the threshold of the back sliding glass door. I flailed my way up the stairs and ran into my room. I ripped open the top dresser drawer I’d hidden the burner phone in that King had given me, tearing it from its hinges, sending socks and the phone sliding across the room. I dove for the phone and hit the speed dial button. It rang several times.
“Come on, pick up,” I prayed, nervously tapping my fingers onto the carpet. When there was so answer I shoved the phone in my back pocket. I was going to grab a duffel bag to toss some essentials into, but looking around that room, there was nothing there I needed.
Nothing I wanted. The only essential things to me were Sammy and King. And one of those was sleeping down the hallway. I’d try calling King again after I got Sammy from his room. “Nadine!” I called out down the hall. The only sounds were coming from downstairs, the hum of the refrigerator and the spinning lull from the running dishwasher. “Nadine!” I called again. “I need you to pull your car around. I’ll explain when we’re on the road, but we have to leave now!”
I opened the door to Sammy’s room. I turned the knob as quietly as I could, closing it again behind me with a soft click. I’d hoped Nadine had heard me and was pulling the car around. I tip-toed over to Sammy’s crib. Leaning over the railing I expected to see my sleepy man with his hair pointed in a million directions, clutching his favorite motorcycle blanket.
Sammy wasn’t in his crib.
It was empty.
The light clicked on and every hair on my neck and arms stood on end.
“It was that fucking weak kiss that gave you away,” a voice said, startling me so much I jumped and knocked into a pile of Sammy’s toys, which came to life in a burst of music and flashing lights. “Tanner. I thought you were meeting us out front? Where’s Sammy?” I tried to hide the shakiness in my voice. I fell backwards and landed against something soft but unmovable. When I turned around to see what it was, I eye to eye with a motionless Nadine. Her eyes unfocused and staring straight ahead. Her mouth still opened as if she’d been surprised.
Dead.
Nadine was dead.
“What the fuck did you do!?” I cried. Tanner stood from where he’d been sitting on the rocking chair I used to rock Samuel to sleep. “Where the fuck is my son!?”
Tanner knelt over me and smiled. But it wasn’t the same toothpaste commercial smile I’d seen before. There was no perfect boy next door behind the menacing expression and crazed look in his eyes. “You used to kiss me like I was the most important person in the world,” he said as he reached out and ran his thumb over my lips. I jerked my head away but he grabbed my chin and yanked it back to him. “You used to love me,” he spat.
“At some point I probably did.” I shook my head. “But I don’t remember,” I lied.
Tanner reared back, delivering a punishing backhand across my face. “Liar!” It stung so bad it rattled my cheekbone and I swore I could hear it vibrating in my ear. “There is no ‘probably’ about it. I know you remember. Do you want to know how I know?”
“Where’s Samuel?” I asked again. “Let me up, Tanner!” I tried to stand.
“No!” Tanner shouted, pushing me down on my shoulders, pinning me to the floor. “You will stay right the fuck there while I’m talking to you. I’ll ask you again, do you want to know how I know you remember me?” Tanner hissed through gritted teeth.
I slowly nodded, giving in and playing the game of question and answer Tanner was so hell bent on playing.
“Because, Ray, I felt your fear. I felt your lips tremble against mine. And the only reason they would do that…would be if you remembered the last time you saw me.”
“You mean the night I caught you fucking Nikki? The night I saw you give her drugs? Hit her? You mean that fucking night?” I yelled pushing up on him. All the anger and rage from that time rushing back into me. Tanner pinned my wrists to my side and laughed in my face.
“Yes, that’s the night.” Tanner reached up to my throat. “But I refer to it as the night I killed you. At least I thought I did.”
He squeezed my throat, cutting off my airway, and then the unexpected happened. It started as a flash of white light, followed by small staccato bits of recollection from right before I’d lost my memory:
Tanner standing over me, reigning down blow after blow on my face and body as Nikki screams for him to stop.
The feeling of being dragged over gritty concrete and hoisted into a pile of trash. The slanted image of the back of Tanner’s legs as he casually strolls from of the alley.
The feel of a finger under my nose searching for signs of breath. The sound of Nikki whispering apologies.
The blue and red lights flashing in the distance. Sirens getting louder and louder as they approach.
Nikki apologizing one last time before the feeling of her frail frame curled up against me disappears.
Being loaded up onto a stretcher as people shout orders all around me.
And then a final memory, but this one different, this one was from weeks after I woke up in the hospital. One I was seeing from an entirely new perspective.
I wake up and open my eyes to Nikki standing over me, eyes furrowed in confusion. “Ray?”
“Huh? I’m sorry do I know you?” For a few seconds I thought she was someone from my past, but then her expression turned annoyed, almost cold.
“No, you don’t know me…but you’re on my fucking bench.”
And then it all made sense.
Why Nikki didn’t tell me who she was, who I really was. Why we went to King’s party that night. Why she insisted that the solution to all of our problems would be the protection of a biker.
The entire time we’d spent together she hadn’t been lying to me.
She was trying to protect me.
The least I could do was fight to protect myself.
I lifted my knee and with all my might I landed a blow right between Tanner’s legs. When he reached down to cup his balls I held his head between my hands, and then there was a deafening crack as my head connected with his. Blood, warm and thick, dripped into the corner of my eye. I stood on shaky legs. “You fucking bitch!” Tanner wailed. Holding onto Sammy’s crib in order to keep myself upright, I attempted to put one foot in front of the other and I just about made it to the door, but I wasn’t fast enough.
Tanner grabbed my ankle and, on the next step, I landed chin first on the carpet. My teeth cutting into my tongue, filling my mouth with the taste of copper.
“I’d rather have you love me, but I’ll settle for you being afraid of me.” Tanner flipped me over onto my back. My head hit the baseboard and the side of my cheek smacked into the side of Sammy’s dresser. I rolled from side to side trying to clear the ringing from my head.
“You are nothing but a fucking cock tease, Ray. The only time I succeeded in fucking you was when I was a dying fifteen-year-old. I thought that us having a kid would tie us together, bring us closer. I thought at least then you would let me into your fucking pussy on a regular basis. That’s why I made sure I put holes in the condom we used that day. Shocked the hell out of me when it actually worked too. And I guess that makes you the lucky one. You were the only one special enough to carry my baby…because I’d made Nikki get ours cut out of her.” Tanner had the audacity to wink. “But even then, with my kid in your belly, you wouldn’t wear my ring. Wouldn’t wear it after either. Said you had plans. Plans you…” Tanner used his fingers to make quotation marks in the air. “Didn’t know if they would include me as more than your best friend and the father of your kid,” he said, using a high-pitched voice, mockingly swaying his head back and forth, from side to side. “Well, golly-gee Ray, sign me up, that sounds fucking swell.”
“Fuck you,” I spat. “Get off of me! You’re a fucking monster!”
“Now you get it! It’s about fucking time, too! Do you even know how exhausting it is pretending to be something I’m not? The fucking all-American kid next door? Your father even liked me, and that asshole doesn’t like anyone! He wasn’t even fucking pissed when I knocked you up! Do you know how hard that was to fucking pull off?”
“Do your parents know what a fucking freak you are?” I asked, struggling underneath him. I looked around on the ground but there wasn’t anything I could use as a weapon.
“You know better than that. They’re more oblivious to me than the senator is to you.”
Tanner pulled the hem of my tank top up over my breasts and I kicked my feet out to push him off of me but he pushed my knees together and straddled me, paralyzing the use of my legs. “But that’s why I had Nikki. She let me fill every fucking hole of hers since we were twelve. And when she started experimenting with drugs it was like winning the lottery, because in exchange for a taste, the bitch would let me do anything. Cut her, burn her, choke her, tie her up until her wrists fucking bled.”
Nikki.
I remembered. All the times she’d shown up to my house with marks all over her body. She’d always made excuses. She cut herself on a nail on the houseboat. She walked into a door. She got bucked off of her cousin’s horse. Nikki had always been clumsy. She didn’t ever have a boyfriend to be suspicious of. And her parents were the modern day Cleavers.
There was nothing to make me question that her excuses were lies, but every single sign that something was very wrong was there.
I’d failed her.
I’d failed her because I was too busy with my perfect little life to even think about the fact that something was far from perfect in hers. I cringed when I thought about all the times I’d bragged about Tanner. About how attentive he was to me. About how great he was with Sammy. She’s the only person I could talk to about being nervous to commit my life to someone when I was still just a kid myself.
“You should thank Nikki, really, she was the only reason I let you have your space. The reason why I was the perfect patient boyfriend. She took every single thing I wanted to give to you. But that fucking slut had to go and fuck it all up. When I dragged you into that alley, she had to go call for help.” Tanner rolled his eyes. “And when they didn’t find your body, and she stopped coming back for dope, I knew you were alive and that cunt was with you. That the two of you were hiding from me.” Tanner smiled a vicious and evil smile again he clasped his hands around my throat and squeezed, playing yet another round of his sick choking game. “But eventually I caught up to Nikki, in that shitty motel room, and when she wouldn’t tell me where you were…” Tanner looked off to the side, lost in a memory. His face reddening. His forehead creasing as he grew angrier. His neck bursting with thick pulsing veins. He refocused his attention on me, tightened his grip around my throat, pressing harder, until I was no longer able to draw in a breath. Tanner pressed his lips against my ear. “…I killed the whore.” He released my throat suddenly. I gasped for air as my windpipe opened back up at an agonizingly slow pace as I tried to fill my lungs.
“Fuck. You,” I said, as soon as I had enough air to say it. Tanner killed Nikki. She didn’t overdose by accident. She didn’t overdose on purpose. My father didn’t kill her. No, the boy next door killed her.
My boy next door.
“I think I like it when you’re afraid of me, makes my fucking dick hard.” Tanner grabbed my wrist and pressed my hand to his hardening erection pressing against his shorts. “Maybe I was wrong all this time. Maybe it should have been you instead of Nikki taking it up the ass,” Tanner said, grabbing a hold of my breast and digging his nails into the tender flesh. I tried not to react. I tried not to scream. I didn’t want to waste my energy on something that wouldn’t get me any results.
I learned that from fighting with King.
“You think I’m afraid of you?” I laughed, shaking my head from side to side. “I’ve known fear, real fear. Shit that would make you piss your fucking khaki shorts. You think you can scare me? Think again. Because I’ve seen what real fear looks like and I’ll tell you something, real fear is much bigger than you, has bright green eyes, and a lot more tattoos.”
“You’re talking about that fucking felon?” Tanner asked, bitterly. “That motherfucker is going to pay for what he did to me the night of the party.”
What did King do to Tanner at the party?
“Oh, he didn’t tell you?” he asked. “I came to your window to make yet another fake apology to the almighty Ray Price when I saw you two.” My eyes went wide. “That motherfucker knew I was there watching, made a show of fucking you in front of me, making you tell him that you love him.” Tanner heaved as if he were about to throw up but took a deep breath and continued, “He fucking came all over your back, literally rubbing it in that you were his!” Tanner grabbed the sides of my head and started lifting it up and pounding it back into the carpet, like he was trying to force his point into me. Over and over again until my eyes started to cross and I saw double. Two crazed Tanners were shouting at me, spit flying out of their mouths as they pounded my head into the floor. “But you’re not his! You’re not fucking his Ramie! You’re not! You’re mine!” Tanner roared. Cocking back his fist, his blow landed in the dead center of my stomach.
All the wind left my lungs. A sharp pain tore up my spine. I turned on my side and folded myself in half, hugging my middle. I prayed that he hadn’t taken away the life that King and I had made.
“Are you afraid of me now, bitch?”
“Stop! Don’t! I’m—” I croaked out, stopping just short of saying the words. Tanner’s eyes went wide. His chest heaved up and down. He didn’t blink. His mouth opened but no words came out. Then suddenly it was if he’d registered what I’d said because he stood from the floor and kicked the side of the dresser, sending the baby monitor and the contents of Sammy’s diaper changing station crashing to the floor around my head.
He crossed back over the room and stood above me, glaring so hard I could feel the heat of his stare. I flinched when he bent down, but he’d only picked up something from the floor.
The phone King had given me. A wicked smile lit up his face. With a guttural roar, he lifted his boot.
The last thing I saw was the heel.
The last thing I felt was it connecting with my face.