Gun Shy

  I knew this car. I’d driven this car more times than I could count. Midnight-blue, with a white racing stripe. I’d held its parts in my hands, their oily black lifeblood smeared over my skin, and watched as Leo put it back together over several years.

  It’s not him.

  We lived in a small town, and when it wasn’t football season, there was very little to do. Our favorite pastime was sneaking out to have sex, careful little rabbits we were, and having a car made that so much easier. Hence our rebuilding of the old Mustang wreck that Leo’s father had somehow acquired but never gotten to fixing. That car was going to take us to our new place after we finished school. It was going to take us to Vegas so we could get married the weekend he turned eighteen. It was going to take our first baby home from the hospital in ten years when we were settled and ready to start a family. We might’ve been young and stupid, but Leo Bentley and I already knew where life was taking us. Life was a midnight-blue Mustang, and it was going places. Places that weren’t Gun Creek.

  I was thirty feet from the car when I saw the arm of a blue football jersey being devoured by flames.

  And I knew, without a doubt, that the boy I’d wanted to marry since I was twelve-years-old, was trapped, bleeding and unconscious, in a car that was on fire.

  “Cassie!” I heard a voice to my left, barely audible over the wind. The voice sounded familiar. Damon King was—is—the town sheriff. He was also my mother’s new husband. He was a nice guy. They’d been married for a couple months when the accident happened. He’ll help, I remember thinking, my teeth chattering so hard I imagined them smashing into pieces that I’d have to spit into the snow. Damon. He’ll get Leo out.

  He didn’t. He ran down the embankment, his sturdy boots and sheriff’s uniform much more weather-appropriate than my flimsy shirt and sneakers. I watched him, assuming he’d go straight to Leo’s door, but instead, he climbed over icy rocks and disappeared around the passenger side of the Mustang.

  What the hell?

  “Leo!” I screamed, my words lost in the wind. It was cold and my throat hurt and I didn’t know what to do. Instinct told me to run away from the car, but love was stronger. Love was foolish as it pulled me to the car like a moth to a flame — ha, a flame, a fucking bonfire now, strangely comforting as its warmth took the edge off my frozen state. Something about the fire snapped me out of my dream-like fog. I looked around and saw nobody. Nobody wanted to risk coming too close in case the car blew up, and I can’t say I blamed them. But me? They’d have to drag me away because I’d burn sooner than leave Leo to die.

  I surveyed the car, my breath bubbling up in my chest as I struggled to stay calm. I had to save him. I had one small thing going for me - the fire was raging much harder on the passenger side of the car. I could see Leo’s arm being licked by the flames, but so far his body and face were out of their path.

  I stepped into the freezing water and waded over to the driver’s side of the car. The car was at an angle and partially submerged in the creek, the water line barely below Leo’s open window. The driver’s door was pinned against a large boulder; there was no way to open it.

  I would have to pull him through the open window. I lay down on the boulder, gasping as icy water seeped through my clothes. I reached my hands into the car window and realized that I’d have to crawl through the window and across Leo to undo his belt. It meant I had to put my hand in the flames. White-hot pain seared every nerve-ending I had, and some I wasn’t aware existed, as I screamed. It burned hot enough to choke me, but I couldn’t pull away until Leo was safe.

  With the pain and the smoke, I started coughing almost as soon as my head was in the car window. I couldn’t bear to look too closely at Leo, not yet. If he died…. No. I refused to even think like that.

  Operating on adrenaline, high on smoke fumes, I was about thirty seconds from passing out when a hand locked around my ankle and pulled. “Cassie!” Damon yelled. “Get back!”

  I kicked my mother’s husband square in the face as hard as I could and resumed my rescue operation. Please don’t die. Hand in the fire, I undid the seatbelt pinning Leo and hooked my hands under his arms. Don’t fucking die on me, not here, not like this.

  Somehow, I managed to pull a two-hundred-pound linebacker out of a burning car and away from the wreckage, dousing his burns in ice water. I made it to the rocky shore, thankful for the slippery ice for once as it helped me pull Leo’s lifeless body along, just in time to cover my face. Something exploded - probably the fuel tank - and showered the creek in pieces of burning metal.

  Shaking wet and on the verge of hypothermia, I pulled Leo into my lap, surveying the damage. He was burned badly along his left arm and part of his neck, but the flames had spared his face. I slapped his cheek softly, my fingers numb slabs of meat. “Hey,” I rasped, quietly at first, then a louder, more insistent yell. “Hey!”

  He didn’t wake up. An ambulance arrived on the bridge, then another. Damon was back, his face ashen, bright blue eyes bloodshot, a streak of blood painting his left nostril down to his lips. I did that.

  “I don’t need an ambulance,” I said to him, as the paramedics pried my fingers away from Leo and lifted him onto a stretcher.

  He said something I didn’t quite catch, something like “other”, pointing to the other side of the embankment where a second team of paramedics were taking a stretcher, and that’s when I understood. My vision narrowed to two pinprick tunnels, and all I could see was my stepfather’s bright blue eyes and the fire as I deciphered his words. He wasn’t saying “other”.

  He was saying mother.

  My mother had been in the car. In the passenger seat. In the fire. There’d been a party at the high school to celebrate the football team getting into the finals. My mom had been there since her husband–my stepfather–helped coach the team after work and on weekends. Leo, I surmised, must have been giving her a ride home. It was less than a mile from the school to our house. Yet somehow, in less than a mile, they had driven off a bridge instead.

  I watched in horror as the paramedics rushed my mother past me. She looked dead. Her lips were blue, half her face was melted like a wax crayon left too long in the sun, and the paramedics were yelling at each other over her still form. One of her legs hung off the stretcher at a strange right-angle and blood flowed like muddy rivers out of her mouth and nose, carving tributaries through her burnt flesh.

  People were talking to me. I guessed they were asking which ambulance I wanted to travel in. As if in slow-motion, I looked between the two vehicles with their flashing lights and bright red sides. The two people I loved most in the world.

  I opened my mouth to speak. Closed it again. I couldn’t hear anymore. Everything was a staccato hiss, everything the sound of the rain as it hit the rocks I stood teetering on. The world tilted suddenly as my legs disappeared beneath me, I heard a loud thwack as the back of my head hit a sharp rock, and then nothing.

  LATER, in the sterile white of the hospital hallway, I started to hear things again. Two rooms, side by side, where teams of doctors worked on the two people I loved most in the world.

  I started to hear things I did not want to hear.

  My mother was in a coma.

  She was almost certainly going to die.

  My boyfriend was awake.

  He had burns on his arm and a concussion.

  My boyfriend was holding his hands out; wrists suddenly handcuffed to the stretcher he was sitting up on.

  Leo. The guy I was going to marry.

  This was all his fault.

  * * *

  THE COP SHIFTED to the side after cuffing Leo, and he spotted me in the hallway. “I’m sorry,” he mouthed, his eyes glassy and red.

  I looked down at my own arm, bandaged from the burns, and wished I’d left him in his car while the flames took over.

  “It should have been you,” I said loudly, my hand burning with pain from where the fire had licked at me. “It should have been fucking you.”
br />   * * *

  AND SO WE SAT, bleary-eyed, on a row of hard hospital chairs. Damon held an icepack to my bleeding skull and we waited. There was so much waiting. For news, good or bad. At that point, we still didn’t know if my mom would make it out of surgery.

  I fell asleep on the chairs, concussed and still wearing my Dana’s Grill uniform, a hot pink shirt and navy blue skirt. I’d taken my sweater off, the sleeves ruined from the fire, and while I slept somebody had wrapped me in one of those emergency tinfoil blankets and covered me with Damon’s dark green SHERIFF jacket. I woke up with a start, muffled words piercing my exhaustion as the back of my skull lanced with pain and I felt fresh blood seep through my matted hair. I needed stitches, but I refused to let anyone near me until I’d heard about my mother’s surgery.

  “I think we should speak in private,” the doctor was saying to Damon, eyeing me with one of those pity looks that I became so accustomed to in the aftermath of the crash. Everyone was so fucking pitying, it was nauseating.

  “No,” I said, sitting up suddenly. I sounded drunk from the Percocet they’d given me. “You can’t leave me by myself.”

  Damon squeezed my hand. “It’s okay,” he said to the doctor. “She’s old enough.”

  The doctor ushered us into a blank room. Bare walls, bare floors, nothing except three hard plastic chairs and a wooden cross hanging on the wall, crooked. Where was the furniture? This was like an interrogation room, not a place of refuge. The only thing to focus on was Jesus’s face, contorted with agony, crucified for a lopsided eternity.

  I sat in one of the hard chairs. Damon paced.

  “Sheriff,” the doctor urged. “Please. Sit down. You’re both exhausted.”

  Damon turned and gave him a look so scathing, he took a step back. Pride blossomed in my chest at his outrage. We’re in this together, I remember thinking.

  We hadn’t always gotten along, Damon and I. My mother had often been a mediator between the two of us when he first moved into our house. But now, we were a single unit. We would pray for my mother to wake, together. Such was the power of our love for her.

  “Sheriff—”

  “Damon.”

  “—Damon. Your wife was gravely injured. Did she often ride without a seatbelt?”

  Not does she. Did she.

  As if she were already dead.

  “What?” Damon choked, his bright blue eyes pooling with tears. “No, she always wears her belt.” I was too shocked to process the information properly. My mom was thirty-eight years old. She couldn’t be dying.

  “Is she going to be okay? Is she dead?” I asked, hope overriding the reality written all over the doctor’s infuriatingly kind face.

  “She’s alive. The machines are keeping her body functioning. Her brain sustained what we believe to be irreparable injury.” A pause. “I’m so sorry.”

  Good news and bad news all wrapped up in one neat little sentence that took the air from my lungs. Your mother is alive. PUNCH. She might as well be dead. PUNCH.

  “Are you sure?” Damon asked.

  I reached for his hand again, his palm damp with sweat, his fingers crushing mine as he squeezed.

  The doctor looked at me apprehensively. “The swelling makes it impossible to tell concisely right now…” he trailed off. He cleared his throat, adding in a half-whisper, “It doesn’t look good.”

  My mind spun as I tried to process what was happening. Beside me, Damon was doing the same. He scrubbed his hand across his jaw, his stare vacant. How could this happen to us? “I am so very sorry,” the doctor repeated. I wanted to throw up. My hand burned where Damon was gripping it. I’d been burned by the flames, and now his touch was like agony.

  I stopped hearing things at that point. I focused every ounce of my attention on the pain in my fingers, the burned skin that was being crushed by Damon’s stronghold. It was an odd comfort, the way the pain distracted me.

  It can’t get worse, I kept thinking to myself. It can’t get worse than this.

  I was wrong.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, I remember Chris, Gun Creek’s Deputy Sheriff, and Leo’s friend, leading Leo away in handcuffs. How could a hallway be so long? It seemed to stretch on forever. Damon pulled me tighter to him, his arm slung over my shoulder, and I sagged into his side. We both watched on, dazed and battle-weary, as Chris led Leo away. They walked and walked until they were pinpricks, and then they were gone.

  IT’S MY FAULT, I would say to myself, over and over. As I held my mom’s hand in the ICU, her face already starting to hollow with death. She was still hanging on, and they’d said any brain swelling needed to go down before an accurate prognosis could be given, but she was already gone. I know it now, picking that memory out of my own brain, folding it over, tearing off the waxy film of denial and hope that marred my view at the time.

  I don’t have that now, and I can tell you that my mother, God rest her soul, exited her body at the moment Leo’s car plowed into the creek and her untethered body smashed into the front dash.

  I’d argued with Leo before I left for work that afternoon. Had yelled at him for something trivial before I stormed off and drove away, leaving him there in the parking lot with balled fists and that horrible longing, that thirst in his eyes that had never really gone away since Karen. I don’t even remember what we fought about now. It was something ridiculous, for sure, minor enough I can’t even recall.

  So I made him angry, he got drunk, climbed into his car, and drove that car through a safety barrier, into a creek, with my mother riding shotgun.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LEO

  NOW

  Lovelock prison, ironically, doesn’t contain a lot of love.

  At least, not the kind of loving I’m looking for. The kind of “loving” your cellmate tries to lay on you when you first arrive. Some of the men here have been in prison for decades - multiple. They’ve long since compromised on what they stick their dicks into.

  Not me. I might not be the most built guy compared to some of the other prisoners here, but I am quick on my feet. My grandfather taught me how to rumble when I was a kid before he died, and I’ve never lost a fight yet.

  Which is handy in a place like this. Because I like my asshole untouched very much.

  “Bentley!” a guard barks from the cell door. I roll my eyes, sliding off the lower bunk in my cell and getting to my feet. I share this cell with three other guys on the sixth floor of Lovelock penitentiary, and it’s no accident that I have the best bed, the most cigarettes, and have never been touched by another male prisoner.

  My fellow prisoners learned my name the day I arrived here, just shy of eight years ago. Some motherfucker tried to make me his bitch. I took his eye out with my toothbrush. One-eyed Al, we call him now. People at Lovelock know the name Leo Bentley, and they don’t fuck with me.

  I saunter up to the guard, taking the cigarette from behind my ear as I do. We aren’t supposed to smoke here, but rules are made to be broken, right? The fucking guards here are just as bad as the inmates. Worse, in some cases.

  Martinez, one of the less abrasive male guards here, waves an envelope through the small hole in the door. My heart leaps into my chest for a moment.

  Is it from Cassie? Did she finally respond to one of the letters I’ve been writing her while I’ve been stuck in this hellhole?

  But then I see the official typed font on the front of the envelope and my hope fades. Of course, it’s not from her. It’s probably from my parole board hearing. I’m not expecting miracles. When you drive off a bridge with the wife of a sheriff in your car and basically kill her, even though she’s not technically dead, people don’t take too kindly to your good behavior record. Mine’s flawless. Nobody ever snitched on me for Al’s missing eye, and he claimed it was self-inflicted. I don’t think he wanted to rat on me for it in case I took the other one while he wasn’t looking. Ha! Jesus. My sense of humor is terrible.

  “Good behavior,” Martinez
says, rolling his eyes. “Good one, Bentley. You sure fooled them.”

  I grip the envelope tightly in my hand. “Huh?”

  Martinez lifts his chin towards the envelope in my hand. “Early release for good behavior. You got somewhere to go, boy?” It’s ironic that he calls me a boy, because I’m twenty-five years old now, and I haven’t been a boy for a very long time. Hard time makes you grow up. If you’re not a man when you enter prison, you’ll sure as hell be one by the time you get out.

  “Uh…” I can’t string a sentence together. I feel like I’ve just had the shit knocked out of me. As I tear the letter open and scan down the print, I can barely understand what it says. It could be written in Chinese, for all I know. Not because I can’t read—I was a straight-A student in high school, even though I was a little prick to my teachers—but because I can’t believe what Martinez has just said.

  I’m finally leaving this shithole.

  I’ve been granted parole.

  Cassie. For a moment, I imagine seeing her again. Kissing her. Fucking her in the backseat of my car, sucking on her neck as she made those little sighs of pleasure beneath me. The way her eyes used to light up whenever she saw me.

  Then I remember her in the hospital, the last time I saw her before they arrested me and dumped my sorry ass in jail. Her eyes didn’t light up for me as our gazes met over her comatose mother. Jesus, Cassie, if you knew how fucking sorry I was, for everything.

  SATURDAY, I’m out of here. In three days.

  Part of me feels like I’m not ready. Even though I want out of this hellhole, the problem is where I’m going after this. I’m almost considering stabbing somebody in here just so I don’t have to go back to Gun Creek and face Cassie and Sheriff King.