My Peace

  I slump into the bed. They bring in fresh boxes, crisp white cardboard, filled with poisons. I flinch. The second guy thrusts one into my hands.

  “It’s time,” he says, and it’s the first time I’ve heard his voice. I don’t recognize it.

  They leave me unbound with the box in my lap.

  I look inside.

  With a sigh, I snort the coke. Once again, my heart-rate speeds up and pounds and pumps and I’m afraid it might explode.

  It doesn’t.

  23

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mila

  I hate Natasha.

  I hate looking at her. I hate smelling her cloying honeysuckle perfume.

  “Why are you wearing that scent?” I demand. “Because Leroy likes it, or to make Pax feel comfortable around you? I know that Susanna used to wear it. I remember Pax telling me so.”

  She smiles.

  “Pax does enjoy it.” She smirking now, baiting me.

  “You wear too much of it,” I tell her. “I shouldn’t be able to smell it from across the room.”

  “Your husband didn’t have to smell it from a distance,” she tells me, her eyes narrowed. “He liked to bury his nose in my neck and smell it up close.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  She laughs, and she’s mocking me.

  “You seem awfully sure of yourself,” she says finally, and she sits in the chair next to my bed. I wasn’t kidding, she is wearing too much perfume, and it actually gives me a headache. I rub at my temples.

  “Of course I’m sure of myself,” I answer tiredly. “Pax doesn’t want you. I know that.”

  Even still, the memory of him emerging from the garage with her, in the middle of the night, it haunts me. When I least expect it, it has popped into my head and tormented me.

  “He does, though,” Natasha says, playing to my doubt. “I saw it in his eyes. The way he touched me that night in the garage. He wasn’t just leaning on me for support, he was feeling me, Mila. He was feeling my body. He wanted me.”

  My stomach clenches, and I force myself to relax. She’s lying to upset me.

  Don’t rise to the bait.

  “I gave him muscle relaxers,” she adds. “I was able to comfort him, to soothe him, in a time when he didn’t trust you enough to tell you about his pain.”

  That startles me.

  “What muscle relaxers?”

  Pax wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t take something so strong. He wouldn’t tempt himself.

  “He didn’t tell you?” Natasha feigns innocence now. “I’m surprised. I thought he told you everything.”

  I’m silent now. Whatever Pax has done, he did it to protect me from something. I know my husband well enough to know that.

  “Little did he know, though,” Natasha says casually as she bites into an apple. It crunches loudly. “That I laced those pills.”

  This snaps my head up.

  “With what?” I try to stay calm, but my heart is racing. “What did you lace them with?”

  She takes another bite.

  “With methamphetamines.”

  She shrugs like it’s no big deal.

  My heart seems to stop, as I think about the recent past, about Pax’s mood swings, and his abnormal behavior. I swallow hard.

  It all makes sense.

  So much sense.

  “But why?” I ask.

  “Why not?” she shrugs again, and I want to slap her head off her shoulders. “Because it’s fun being the cat. Pax is the mouse,” she adds unnecessarily.

  “You were fucking with him,” I say.

  “You’re a bright one.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Such words coming out of a lady’s mouth,” she chuckles. “I wanted to make him pay. What’s the best way to make someone like him pay? He had a rough childhood. He finally had a life that he enjoys. The only way to pay is take all of that away.”

  I feel a twinge in my belly. I’ve got to calm down. The pain is sharp, and I press my hand to it.

  “Get out,” I spit. “Get the fuck out.”

  “You don’t get to tell me what to do,” she mentions. “But I don’t like you any more than you like me.” She stands up, and tosses her apple core into my trash, then slowly and deliberately, walks out. I have another sharp pain.

  I rush to the bathroom and yank down my pants.

  There is blood in my underwear.

  24

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Pax

  I wake craving coke.

  I crave the sting in my nose and the rush in my blood and the numbness in my mouth.

  It’s something that slams me into reality hard, like a truckload full of stones.

  I’m addicted to cocaine now. And heroin. And probably PCP. They’ve made sure of that. And for what? What is the point?

  How did they manage to get me addicted within two weeks?

  I’m an addict.

  It happened so fast.

  I feel empty inside, something that begins in my belly, flows through my veins, and ends in my heart. It doesn’t matter what they do to me now. They’ve done the worst they can do.

  I promised Mila years ago that I’d never hurt her again. This will kill her, and that will kill me.

  I sit staunchly on the floor, waiting as they come in. I don’t know what they’re doing, and I don’t care.

  “You’ve been a good boy today,” the man says, the one who always talks. “So we’ve brought you a reward.”

  He hands me a piece of paper. It looks like it’s been ripped out of something, and I decide it’s a journal page.

  It’s yellowed with age, and it’s written in faded blue ink pen in a masculine scrawl. It’s Leroy Ellison’s journal.

  One page.

  Today, I watched the house for an hour before I crept to the window and looked in. The father isn’t home from work yet. He neglects them terribly. Always gone, comes home late. He’s addicted to work, I think. The boy is rambunctious. He’s always into something, and she chases behind him. Wherever he goes, she follows. I’m not sure that I would want him to come after I take her. We shall see.

  She’s a good mother, though. I admire that about her. If I don’t take him, she’d resent me. I don’t want that. It’s a quandary.

  Jesus.

  My breath leaves my body as I read the words.

  He’d observed our home for quite some time before he’d broken in and forced himself on my mother. God only knows for how long.

  She’s a good mother, though.

  Those words, even though they’re from a psychopath, warm my numb heart. Even a psychopath could see her love for me. He doesn’t have feelings. Yet he recognized hers. That’s how strong they were.

  She loved me so much she died protecting me.

  It’s something I thought I’d dealt with, but the magnitude of that overwhelms me now. If it hadn’t been for me, if I hadn’t rushed out of that closet to “save” her, she’d still be alive. She’d still be smiling. She’d still be here.

  But she’s not.

  And it’s my fault.

  I swallow hard. Then I get up, cross the room, and open the next box two hours earlier than I am supposed. I inject the heroin.

  The pain disappears.

  Hazy warm comfort replaces it.

  The blackness, the void, it sucks me in. There is no pain in the abyss.

  It doesn’t last long enough though, for barely an hour. So I open the next box early, too. It’s also heroine. I’m thankful for that. I press the plunger and close my eyes.

  The pain, the emotion, the consciousness, all disappear into nothing.

  I close my eyes.

  * * *

  I open my eyes.

  I blink. My eyes are dry so I blink again. Then again.

  I am flat on my back, I think.

  I must be, because I think I’m staring at a ceiling. There’s a light above me. It comes in and then out of focus.

  It’s hard to say, bec
ause I feel like I’m floating. Through space, through water, through something. Something murky, yet I can’t touch it. I stretch out a hand. It comes back with nothing. Just air.

  I’m the perfect temperature. Not hot, not cold.

  There is no pain. That’s the most blessed thing. My leg doesn’t hurt. My ribs don’t hurt. My heart doesn’t hurt. Not anymore.

  Nothing bothers me here, not in this abyss. Worries, stress, reality. All are gone. Far from me, far from here.

  I can’t feel.

  I can’t think.

  I don’t need to.

  Still, even though it’s perfect here, and black and void, something isn’t right. I know that. It niggles at me, bothering me, like an itch. I scratch at it, at the thought, and I realize that it bothers me because I shouldn’t be here.

  This is an old familiar place, a place I haven’t visited in a long time.

  Oblivion.

  How did I get here?

  What the fuck happened?

  I furrow my brow and try to think…

  My brain is foggy. It takes me a few minutes, then a few minutes more, to remember.

  I’m in my bedroom. Mila isn’t here.

  But drugs are. That’s what I need right now. It’s driving me. The urge to inhale, to burn.

  I want to burn.

  I open a box.

  25

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The boy is easy.

  Today, I called him over to the mail truck and gave him two pieces of candy, and asked where his mother was. She was in the kitchen making lemonade.

  The boy took me in, and I hand delivered her mail.

  She was surprised, but pleasantly so. She said she’d never had anyone take the trouble. She gave me a glass of lemonade, and we went outside and sat in the shade while the boy kicked a ball on the lawn.

  I could live like this.

  I can tolerate the boy.

  The woman’s name is Susanna, and it suits her. She is like a blue sky and sunny day, and she smells like sweet honeysuckle.

  I imagined that I was licking her skin today, and I must’ve lost myself in the fantasy. She noticed, and asked if I was ok.

  I had to excuse myself.

  I beat off in the mail-truck thinking about her.

  Soon, soon. It will be her.

  The journal entry makes me sick to my stomach.

  I let him into our home? I was swayed by two pieces of candy? God.

  She welcomed him, and gave him lemonade and a rest from his weary day, and he repaid her by assaulting her later. What kind of monster is he?

  The outrage that I know I feel is dulled by the drugs.

  I know it is there, lurking in my heart, though.

  My anger is a slumbering beast. It has always been there, hidden from the world. I masked it, but I couldn’t exorcise it.

  It is a part of me.

  I know that now.

  I sit on the floor, and I grab a box.

  I’m three boxes ahead of schedule, and my captors like that. In fact, they rewarded me today with the journal page. I’m sure they’ll continue.

  The higher I get, the more pages they’ll give me.

  The drugs dull the pain. It’s a win-win situation.

  I shoot up, and the familiar burn tears into me, spreading through my arm like a raging fire. I drop my head back, and I sit in the window seat, and I stare out at the lake.

  It makes me feel small. It is vast and wide, and it could suck me in and drown me.

  In this moment, I almost wish it would.

  It would suck away all of this.