Gun Shy

  We drive Hannah to the hospital under the cover of darkness. We tell her we’re going on a vacation, and she gets so excited, she ends up packing a bathing suit, all of her coloring books, and every stuffed toy ever made.

  The doctor’s smile fades as he takes more measurements and calls more doctors in. Hannah is doing so well. I’m so fucking proud of her. I keep giving her candy, so distracted by keeping her calm that I don’t notice the two doctors in the room has given way to ten different people, squinting at the screen.

  Hannah notices, too, because she starts to freak out a little bit. I manage to keep her calm long enough for the doctor to send them all out and bring in a new sticker book for her. It’s got all the Disney princesses, and she gets to work on it while the doctor and I talk in the hall.

  Always shutting her away while we talk about her. I feel a brief flash of anger at my mother. She did this. Hannah would be so smart, so capable, if Mom hadn’t poisoned her. It would have been better if she’d been shooting up heroin during her pregnancy— at least then detox as a newborn would have been the worst of Hannah’s struggles. But alcohol has effectively ruined her chance of ever growing up, a girl stuck in a body that gets older as she stays a little child. As it grows a child.

  The news is bad. Very fucking bad. “Incompatible with life” is what they say, but what they actually mean is that if a disabled girl has a baby with her own biological father, things are generally going to fuck up. We don’t tell the doctors the Daddy Carter part, of course. I haven’t even told Pike that part yet. It’s a knowledge I carry in my chest like a delicately balanced grenade with a faulty pin, waiting to explode.

  Child Protective Services show up at the hospital, two of the motherfuckers, and it takes some very fast-talking to get them to back off. They won’t let Hannah come home with us, though. She’s a minor who has been raped and is in her third trimester. Not only that, she’s got something called preeclampsia, and she’s one bad day away from multiple organ failure. From death. My baby sister is teetering on the brink of dying because of what that bastard did to her.

  She needs to be induced. But first, she needs a legal guardian. And since neither Pike nor I are legally her parent, that leaves one particular bitch who needs to fix this situation.

  Yes, in the end, the only way to save my sister from the system is to go home with Pike to collect our useless fucking mother. It means a four-hour round trip to Gun Creek and then back to Reno - a trip we’ve already made once today. Time is against us — if Hannah’s situation worsens, CPS will step in and make her a ward of the state. They’ll decide what happens to our sister. And we’ll never see her again.

  That cannot happen.

  Pike speeds the entire way home. It’d be much easier if we were in the Mustang, but sadly we’re relegated to his piece of shit Honda. As soon as we arrive back home, Pike locks the car doors before I can open my door. I glare at him, a fist in his face and a growl in my throat. I am fucking homicidal. I will kill everyone I lay eyes on, family or not, to get my sister fixed and back home where I can keep her safe.

  “Unlock the fucking door,” I hiss at my brother.

  He stares at me with eyes that have seen the weight of the world and have been crushed beneath it. “You can’t kill her yet,” he says flatly. “Not until we get Hannah back.”

  “I know that,” I fume. Yet. You can’t kill her yet. Not You can’t kill her.

  “She’s not going to come with us,” Pike adds.

  “I know that, too,” I reply. “You got a gun?”

  I expect my brother to yell at me, to tell me I’m crazy. But he doesn’t. It’s been a long eight years while I’ve been locked up. He nods. “In my bedroom,” he says. “Underneath my bed. You want me to get it?”

  I shake my head. “You keep the car running. Those social workers won’t wait around long. They’ll have Hannah in the system and shipped off to a fucking foster home if we’re not back in a hot minute.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Pike mutters.

  “The gun. Is it loaded?”

  He nods.

  “Well, all right then. If you see her running, fucking run her over and throw her in the trunk, will you?”

  I burst into the trailer like a man possessed. If I were an action hero right now, I’d be Hulking out. But since I’m just a human, and an average one at that, I go for the gun. It’s exactly where Pike said. Thank you, little brother. A sawn-off shotgun - perfect. I’m almost sad that I need my mother alive right now. Blowing her head clean off with a double-barrel would be poetic at this point. I stand in the kitchen and holler.

  “Mommy!” I yell mockingly. “Where are you?”

  I hear movement in the main bedroom and stalk down the hallway like a fucking panther on the hunt. She’s there, sitting up in bed in her pajamas. A cigarette burns between her lips. She barely gives me a glance but doubles back to me when I pump the shotgun in one hand and aim it at her head.

  “What-what are you doing, baby?” she slurs. Great. The bitch is high as a kite. I bite down on the insides of my cheeks. “Get up,” I spit.

  She closes her eyes. I glance at the bedside table — sure enough, she’s got all the ingredients for a one-person smack party. There’s a syringe caked in dried blood, a length of rubber tubing, a dirty spoon, a lighter. It’s the middle of the afternoon on a weekday and my mother is high. Go figure.

  I pour a glass of water over her head and she sputters to life. She can barely talk. It’s okay - we have a long drive ahead. It’s almost easier that she’s all soft and rubbery from the heroin. In the end, I simply grab a fistful of her dirty hair and drag her to the car.

  I throw her into the backseat, triumphant when her head hits the opposite window. I hope it bleeds. I hope it fucking clots and kills her.

  THREE HOURS LATER, we arrive back at the hospital with one sober, pissed-as-fuck mother. Hannah’s vitals have crashed in the six hours we’ve been collecting Mom, and they’re preparing to perform an emergency c-section as we arrive. The doctor — who is highly suspicious of all three of us — reluctantly tells us that Hannah is sedated, but is allowed one person in the operating room with her. “I’ll go,” my mother volunteers. “My baby would want me to be there with her in case she wakes up.”

  I smile at the doctor. “Give us a second,” I say, taking my mother’s elbow and steering her out of earshot.

  “Let go of me,” she says. “Listen to your mother.”

  I stare directly into her bloodshot eyes, well aware that my fingernails are digging into her arm hard enough to break the skin. “You listen to me, you useless cunt,” I whisper, in a voice loud enough for just her and I. “Hannah’s in here because of you. Her baby is going to die because of you. She’s pregnant with Hal Carter’s deformed baby because of you. Hannah’s father. Did. This. To. Her.”

  All the blood drains away from her sunken cheeks; she starts to cry. “W-what?”

  “I will be going into that surgery with her,” I say, towering over my mother. “And you will be sitting out here, thinking about how you should kill yourself when we get home.”

  “Leo…” she whimpers.

  “You’re not a mother,” I continue. “You’re a whore. A whore who should have been sterilized at birth.”

  She slaps me across the face with all the feeble strength a skinny junkie’s arm can muster. And it stings; not so much physically, but deep in my chest. And then, she leans against the wall, her face in her hands, and begins to sob.

  I glance at Pike. “Go,” he says, waving me away. “I’ll keep her here in case she needs to sign anything.”

  Hannah is already on the table when the nurse ushers me into the theatre, clad in surgical scrubs, plastic bags over my boots. She leads me to the head of the bed, a green cotton sheet separating Hannah’s head and shoulders from the rest of her body. On the other side of the bed, an anesthetist watches her closely, glancing at a screen that displays heart rate and blood pressure. And her blood pressure is through
the fucking roof. Poor Hannah. This baby is literally killing her just by existing. I stroke her hair. She might not know what’s happening, but it makes me feel better to lay my hand on her head and remind her she is loved.

  Later that night, when Hannah is out of the recovery ward, Pike and I sit beside her hospital bed while our mother hovers silently at the foot of the bed. I called Amanda and asked her to pick up the younger kids from school. Everyone is safe, for now.

  “My baby’s gone,” Hannah says, putting her hand on her stomach.

  It’s still swollen, which I wasn’t expecting, but the doctors warned me she’d be pretty banged up for awhile after they removed her uterus to stop the bleeding.

  Yeah. In the end, the decision was out of my hands. She almost died on the table when they went in to take the baby out. It was a boy. He looked all wrong, but he was still a baby. It still broke my fucking heart that he’d had to be conceived and suffer because people are cruel and vile and evil. He was alive for thirteen minutes, and Pike held him that whole time. I couldn’t bear to hold him, knowing that he was going to die in my arms.

  We named him after my grandfather, my mother signed the paperwork, and then a nurse took him away.

  I asked Hannah if she wanted to hold him, but she said no. I was relieved.

  No kid should have to see something like that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CASSIE

  I was fall-down drunk the night it happened. The night Damon — well, you’ll see.

  My eighteenth birthday. I’d been at the Grill, eating and sneaking beers on the side with Chase and the rest of the football boys. I think they pitied me in the aftermath of the accident, took me under their protection and made sure I was “taken care of,” in a way.

  Chase had driven me home around eleven after we’d all stopped at the football field and had some more to drink. It had started raining while we were lying on the grass, drinking and passing around a joint that made my head spin every time I took a drag.

  The porch light had been the only one still on, and I’d tried to unlock the front door as quietly as possible, but ended up making about the same amount of noise as a feral cat stuck in a trashcan. Suddenly, the door opened from the inside, yanked unceremoniously, and I fell flat on my face beside two bare feet. I watched, mesmerized, as droplets of water began sliding off my rain-soaked arm and dripping on to the floor, puddling beneath me.

  “Fuck,” I muttered, my cheek buzzing from where it had hit polished wood. It’d hurt once the alcohol in my system burned up. I grabbed at the floor with clumsy fingers, trying to get up, when I was hoisted to my feet.

  Damon was bleary-eyed as he glared at me as though he’d been sleeping. He was still wearing his police-issued shirt and pants, and the tan-colored clothes were wrinkled, adding to that “slept in” look.

  “What do we have here,” he said, but it wasn’t really a question. He sighed, resting his forehead against the door momentarily. “A drowned rat. A drunk rat.”

  I giggled. He slammed the door shut, circling me as I stood and dripped all over the floor.

  “Are you… stoned?” he asked, grabbing my chin, forcing my eyes to meet his.

  “No, Sheriff!” I replied, mock-saluting him. I dissolved into another pile of giggles because suddenly, everything was so fucking funny. I heard him mutter Jesus Christ under his breath.

  “If your mother saw you—”

  “Yeah, she’s not going to see me,” I cut him off, sobering a little. The giggles were gone, replaced by an intense sadness, a loneliness inside me that stretched as wide and as empty as the prairie surrounding us. The feeling sucker punched me in the gut, and I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering.

  “Cassie—”

  “She’s dead already,” I said. I started to cry. Big, heaving sobs and fat tears that rolled down my cheeks, mixing in with the rain and blurring my already less-than-stellar vision.

  “Cassie.” Softer this time. Sympathetic. Arms went around me, even though I was soaked from the rain and probably smelled like stale beer. I rested my ear against his chest, and it was almost like somebody loved me for a moment. I closed my eyes, melting into Damon’s chest, listening to his heartbeat evenly under flesh and bone.

  “Hey,” he said, leaning back a little. He tipped my face up with his finger. “We’ll get through this. It’s going to work out. Okay?”

  I shook my head, utterly miserable. “Not okay. It’s not okay.”

  “Cassie, stop,” he said quietly, his arms stiffening around me so I couldn’t breathe. “Stop.” I was a chatty drunk, an emotional drunk, and I didn’t heed the warning signs that signaled his turning mood.

  “We have to turn her off,” I whispered against his chest. “We have to let her die.”

  His fingers squeezed into my arms; the first time Damon ever left bruises on me.

  “Shut up!” he yelled, and now he was really angry. He shoved me away from him and my back hit the kitchen counter.

  “Don’t you ever talk like that,” he said, blue eyes ablaze, a finger in my face. “You don’t just give up on your own mother. Do you know how many people don’t even have a mother? And you just want to let yours die?”

  I stared at the floor, my hands gripping the counter behind me. I despised confrontation. I hated yelling. I hated the fact that I wanted my mother to hurry up and get better or hurry up and die.

  My heart started to race. An uneasy feeling started to drip into my veins and spread like wildfire through my body. Something very bad was about to happen, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was, or how to stop it.

  I tried to walk past him to the stairs, but he blocked me. Blue eyes stared me down as a hand shot out and pressed me back against the counter.

  “Damon—” I started.

  A hand went over my mouth, another at my tank top pulling it down so that my breast was exposed. The sudden cold air on my flesh shocked me out of my stupor, and I slapped him across the face as hard as I could, pulling my top back up to cover myself. Something flashed in Damon’s eyes — anger?

  We stared off for a moment. I was stone cold sober in the space of about thirty seconds. In my head, above the drunken chatter and buzz, there was a realization: We can never go back from this.

  “I heard what you said about me,” he said, his sudden neutral tone disarming. The flip of a switch. The edge of a blade. There you are.

  “What?” I edged to the side, thinking that if I could just keep him talking long enough, he’d calm down.

  “When you found Karen. In my car, after. You were on the phone to that friend of yours. I heard what you said.”

  My stomach twisted painfully. “What?” I repeated. Somewhere in the edges of my consciousness, a thought gnawed at me, a memory. I’d joked about the hot new sheriff to one of my friends. Anything to break up the ugly silence that had punctuated the days after Karen’s body was found.

  Damon stepped forward without warning, his hips trapping me against the counter.

  “I was sixteen!” I said, pushing at his chest. “I was joking!”

  He shook his head, one hand around my throat as he dragged me to the ground and trapped me underneath him. “And now you’re eighteen. And I’m not joking.”

  I tried to fight him, to get him off me, but it didn’t matter. He was stronger. He’d always been stronger than me.

  It hurt. I remember it hurting.

  I remember begging him to stop.

  I remember him ignoring me.

  I’m sorry, Damon said to me after. He kissed me on the cheek. Hugged me tightly, so tightly I heard my neck crack from the pressure. I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I was too busy trying to breathe.

  While I was still on the floor, too terrified to move, he got up and sat at the kitchen table, right next to my head. After a few minutes, he picked me up, cradled me to his chest like a baby, and put me in his car.

  I’d thought that maybe he was going to kill me. I was terrified
. I kept looking at the gun on his hip, the shiny silver metal glinting each time we passed under a streetlight. We drove all the way to Tonopah and into a drive-thru in complete silence.

  A cheeseburger and fries, and a little kid’s toy for me on the side of my meal. I was shaking, my entire body having some kind of fit, and I threw the bag of food back in his face, punching him for effect.

  He broke my nose for that.

  He won, in the end. Made me eat every single bite of that meal, choked down, washed down forcefully with the giant Pepsi he’d ordered for me. It was his way of apologizing, I realized much later. His way of trying to make things right between us. A fucking kid’s fast-food meal. I’m sorry for raping you, have this collectible action figurine.

  When I’d finished eating, he drove home. We sat in the driveway for a long time, the engine idling as the pain between my thighs grew hotter and more fierce, bruises blossoming across my skin as the stupor in my brain increased. A large Pepsi, filled with fucking sleeping tablets. The bitterness at the back of my throat. I tried to hold onto the dashboard of the car while Damon put his head in his hands and cried.

  The next morning, I woke up in my bed. He’d put me there, my thighs and the mattress underneath me still damp from whatever else he’d done while I was drugged and unconscious.

  I took the Volvo — the car Damon drove when he had a day off and his patrol car was needed — and I drove all the way to fucking Reno. I didn’t stop for food. I didn’t stop to pee. I drove and drove and when I got there, I flirted for a moment with the possibility that I had gotten away.

  He found me, of course. He was five minutes behind me the entire time. The GPS system in the car was synced with his cell phone. He’d already anticipated that I’d flee after what he’d done.

  The second time, a few nights later, I barely resisted. I fought him at first, sure. But once he had me pinned, I just kind of gave up and let him do what he wanted.

  I think I disappointed him, in a way.