The Fall: The Rift Book I

  Darkness greeted her inside and the creepy sensation of being watched tiptoed up her spine. Silly girl. Always jumping at shadows. She made her way down the hall, using the wall to guide her like a blind person while old floorboards creaked beneath her feet. At the end of the hall she reached her hand around and flicked on the kitchen light. Her eyes adjusted to the new brightness. There was no one there—not leaning against the counter, not sitting at the dining table, not hanging by a noose from the ceiling fan. Kyra sighed. Wishful thinking.

  She set her purse on the counter and her keys in the jar next to the sink with care, and opened the fridge. The previous night’s dinner—Chinese takeout—sat in its small cardboard container on the top shelf. She opened the top and pulled out the last piece of sweet-and-sour pork. It wasn’t much, but she had to eat something. The liquor churning in her stomach demanded as much.

  The sound of someone clearing their throat shattered the silence and Kyra froze. She turned around and there he stood, in the murky passageway where the kitchen and living room met. His eyes glimmered like a cat’s.

  “Shit, Justin!” she exclaimed. “You scared me!”

  Justin Holcomb entered the light. He was quite a large man, standing six-foot-two with forearms the size of her thighs and a barrel chest. The extra pounds he’d packed on over the last ten years, showing in the paunch around his belly and the spare padding in his ass, seemed to heighten his stature. Instead of appearing clownish, which was how she usually saw him, now he looked careless.

  If the past were prologue, with Justin Holcomb, careless meant dangerous.

  “Where have you been?” he said in a shrill yelp that bordered on comical, and then coughed violently. Kyra stepped back and stared at him as he hacked away. Huge black raccoon rings surrounded his eye sockets. His flesh had taken on a silvery sheen, slick with sweat. His voice oozed of exhaustion and anger.

  “I was working,” said Kyra with a roll of her eyes. She cast aside his appearance and breezed past him into the dark living room. She threw her voice over her shoulder. “Where I always am on weeknights.”

  Justin followed at her heels. “It’s going on five the fuck o’clock in the morning,” he growled. “The bar closes at two.”

  She turned on the table lamp. The ashtray beside Justin’s easy chair overflowed with cigarette butts and three tattered old copies of Guns and Ammo were stacked haphazardly on the table. It looked like he’d been sitting there, alone and in the dark, for hours.

  “What’s your point?” she asked. She couldn’t understand where all this anger was coming from.

  “Your shift ends at two,” he repeated.

  “And?”

  “Where…the fuck…have you been?”

  She batted her eyes at him, the one trick she could always count on to shift his bad moods, but it didn’t work. So she sighed and said, “Like I said, at work. A couple kids got into a fight, left the place a huge mess. I spent the last few hours picking glass up off the floor and mopping up stale beer. In other words, I’m tired now. I want to go to bed.” It wasn’t a complete lie—she had been at work, after all—but there’d been no fights that night. Escaping into a Harper Allen romance novel was the real reason she was so late. She didn’t know why she wouldn’t just tell him that, but chalked it up to old habits dying hard.

  Justin took a menacing step toward her. “What a load of shit!” he screamed. “You were with him again, weren’t you? I know you were! Don’t fucking lie to me!”

  “I wasn’t with anyone, dear,” replied Kyra while shaking her head as if at a silly puppy. “I was at work. Call Barb if you don’t believe me. Sorry, but it’s true.”

  His tone dropped to a low rumble. “You’re a lying whore. Duke told me he saw you getting all friendly with that little yuppie fuck from the bank the other night. What, you think I don’t know these things? You think I’m fucking stupid? I got eyes all over this town, babe.”

  Kyra ignored his macho posturing and focused on the accusation. She knew exactly who he meant: Jack Trombley, a sweet guy with a wife and two kids back home who’d become a regular as of late. Jack had taken to sitting in a secluded corner, waiting for her rounds to finish so he could have a few moments to air his feelings. They talked about their respective problems often, but had never once been intimate. Did he find her attractive? Maybe. Probably. But he never said anything about it or made even a token attempt at flirting. The thought had never crossed her mind, in fact, until Justin came out with his accusation. She found it pretty funny, though not so much in a ha-ha kind of way, that Justin would suspect anything between the two of them. She’d cheated on him many times over the years, occasionally being daring and drunk enough to flaunt it in front of him, and yet her husband, on those occasions, either didn’t notice or didn’t care. But take a case like this, where some random guy wanted nothing but her company, time, and respect, and he blew a gasket.

  “Listen, darling,” she said, “I haven’t been with anyone. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Bitch, don’t you dare ‘darling’ me.”

  “Don’t open your mouth to me like that,” she snapped. “Show me some goddamn respect, you lousy fuck. The guy Duke saw me with is a friend, that’s it. We talk…like me and a hundred other motherfuckers do on a nightly basis. And shit, besides, Jack wasn’t even at the bar tonight. Like I said, there was a fi—”

  Her chest exploded in a burst of liquid fire as Justin’s fist struck her breastplate, robbing her of both words and breath. Kyra’s head snapped forward with the force of the blow. She collapsed to one knee and gasped for air. Shock stripped her of coherent thought.

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” he shouted. “SHUT YOUR DIRTY, ASS-FUCKING CRACK! YOU DON’T DISRESPECT ME, AND YOU DON’T FUCK ANYBODY ELSE!” He shoved her over and kicked her in the rear. Kyra tried to scurry away on her hands and knees, fingernails digging deep into the shag carpet, but he grabbed her by the back of her pants and dragged her into the middle of the room, where he began thumping her with a combination of fists and feet. She lashed out against him out of pure instinct, eyes closed, scratching at his arms and face, but he wouldn’t stop. Blow after blow landed on her chest, her stomach, her sides, and at least once on her cheek. Her world became a dizzying kaleidoscope of physical torment.

  The instinctive part of her brain said, kick him in the balls, and that’s just what she tried, bringing her leg up blindly with as much force as she could gather. His sensitive little sack mashed against her shin and a wounded yelp followed. Droplets of spit landed on her cheek, their impact waking her from her shocked state. Her eyes snapped open and she kicked him again, this time sending him down onto his side. She thrust with her opposite leg and slid from under him, flipped over, and got first to her knees, then to her feet, and darted for the kitchen.

  One of her chunky boot heels snapped off when she passed from carpet to linoleum, but that didn’t stop her. She made a beeline for the stove, beside which sat the chopping block and knife caddy. Her hand grasped the handle of the butcher knife and she pulled it free, wheeling around with it held in front of her. The tendons in her neck pulled taut. Her whole body shook.

  Justin stumbled through the entryway, holding his nutsack and moaning. He looked up at her and coughed. Amazingly enough, the rage had drained from his face.

  “You…kicked me…” he said.

  “Damn straight,” she replied. The side of her jaw stung. It felt like her tongue had been wrapped in bandages. With her free hand she took the telephone receiver off its cradle. Justin began to come forward.

  “Get any closer and I stick you in the gut with this,” she said, flashing the knife at him.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked in a pathetically pleading voice.

  She pressed the Talk button and dialed 9-1-1. “Calling the cops.”

  Justin straightened up, cracked his neck, coughed again, and then asked, amazingly, “Why?”

  Kyra was so flabbergasted that she almost dropped the phone.
“Why? What? Are you kidding me?”

  Without another word, Justin started forward again. She shielded herself from him, but he gave her a wide berth and limped out of the room. She heard his thumping footfalls as he went down the hall, the creak of the front door when he opened it, and the battalion-like roar of his Chevy engine when he pulled out of the driveway and sped off.

  “You don’t ever fucking hit me,” she muttered to the empty air. She could almost feel steam rise from her ears.

  “Excuse me?” a lady’s voice asked over the phone.

  She’d been so busy worrying about Justin’s next move that she forgot she had the police on the other line.

  “Sorry,” she said. “My husband and I got into a fight. He hit me pretty hard…”

  While speaking to the 9-1-1 operator, Kyra put the knife down and let a wandering hand drift to her belly. It stung to the touch.

  There’s definitely gonna be a big bruise there tomorrow, she thought.

  * * *

  It was past noon by the time Kyra awoke. She’d slept in the spare bedroom with the door locked and the knife clutched in her hands. Justin hadn’t returned after she spoke with police, as far as she knew—the cop who took her statement, Officer Bartlett, had predicted as much—but as her mom (and everyone else’s for that matter) used to say, better safe than sorry. So she got out of bed slowly, dragging her feet with her sore legs down the hall in a shuffle, peering around each corner like a player in a bad detective movie. It took a good half-hour of careful searching before she was amply satisfied that her husband wasn’t lurking behind a curtain, under a table, or in the refrigerator. He was just…gone.

  Kyra wasn’t sure how much good calling the police had done. Officer Bartlett was plenty helpful, being the newbie he was, but Sergeant Jerry Baxter was another story. This was a guy who drank with her husband, bowled with her husband, even got high with him on more than one occasion. When Jerry promised he would go talk with Justin, asked her to please not press charges, and proceeded to say it was nothing but a big misunderstanding, she told him to get out of her house and slammed the door in his face. Perhaps the folks at the courthouse would treat her differently. She could only hope so.

  The coffee maker heaved its liquid sigh and Kyra poured herself a cup. She drank it without her usual cream and four sugars, wanting nothing more than to feel the throb of its black heat on her sore inner jaw to numb it. Whiskey would’ve worked better, but she was in no shape to go down that road, not after the morning she’d had.

  She went to sit at the kitchen table and felt a stab of pain in her midsection. The bruise was huge, all right, but that wasn’t what went through her mind as she lowered her backside into the chair and rubbed the sore spot. No, that wasn’t it, at all.

  What she did think about was how this whole mess had started in the first place.

  It began more than twenty years ago, on a beautifully brisk April evening. Kyra and Justin had been dating for three years by then: he, the former high school jock still holding on to past glory a year past graduation; she, the striking cheerleader, the focus of many an underclassmen’s pubescent fantasies. Kyra turned eighteen that day, and although she didn’t feel any real sort of affection for her longtime boyfriend—their relationship had more or less been one built around the truism of social climbing, the way couplings between popular children many times are—it still pleased her to no end when, out of nowhere, Justin decided he would treat her to a romantic night out.

  Justin spent the evening acting the perfect gentleman. He pulled out her chair at the restaurant, ran over to open the car door for her, and seemed to listen with interest when she spoke. For the first time Kyra began to think they had a future that would last beyond her inevitable departure for college. Her spirits rose and she drifted through the experience as if she’d been anointed princess for a night, excited beyond belief for whatever might come next.

  They headed north after dinner, toward the town of Berwick, Maine. Justin parked his truck behind a dilapidated barn that overlooked a vast field. He brought a few blankets and guided her to the middle of that field, laying the biggest blanket out on the still-frosted grass. There they lay in peace for a while, staring up at the cloudless night sky. Kyra could hear his heart picking up its pace and hers rose to match it. His hand crept beneath her sweater and squeezed her breast and she didn’t stop him. Neither did she stop him when he kissed her, or unzipped his pants, or hiked up her skirt, or clumsily fingered her, or pushed himself inside her. They made love briefly—not their first time, and definitely not their best, but still, she thought, quite special—until Justin stiffened and she felt her thighs grow sticky and warm. After that they curled into each other and lay there, he content and she somewhat so, until drizzle started to fall from the sky.

  Kyra shook her head and took another burning sip of coffee. Please don’t go there, I don’t want to go there, she thought, but what choice did she have in the matter? After the beating she’d gotten last night, there was no way in hell this poor excuse for a marriage could be salvaged. She’d never have it. One of her stipulations, her guiding principles, had always been this: Hitting me is a deal-breaker. He’d hit her. Beat her. Deal broken. End of story. In time, she would only have memories.

  She glanced at the clock. Eight minutes past one o’clock. She’d slept less than five hours and her body felt it, but her mind seemed alive and eager. She stood up and walked into the living room. In daylight it didn’t seem as menacing as it had when only the desk lamp lit it and Justin loomed over her, belting her with all his might. She got down on all fours, her knees and shin smarting along with the rest of her bruised body, and reached beneath the couch, grasping blindly until her hand found what it searched for—a plastic bag covered in a decade’s worth of dust. She pulled the sack out, examined its contents from the outside, and flicked the edge with her finger. The last time she glanced at these little snippets of history she promised herself she’d throw them away, but she could never bring herself to actually do it. Now there they were, a small stack of four-inch squares concealed in plastic. She suddenly wished she had tossed them out.

  Kyra’s body shook as she opened the bag and carefully removed one of the glossy images. A white border surrounded a black interior. The object in the center of the blackness—a smudged gray blur, somewhat oval in shape—looked like an abstract painting. Tears welled up as her eyes recognized first a foot, then a leg, then settled on the small, circular outline in the center of the mass, the heart that once beat vigorously inside her, the live-giving force of a spirit that never saw the light of day.

  Those memories she didn’t want came pouring back. She remembered everything: the way she felt when she first discovered the pregnancy; the way she hid it from her folks in fear that they’d disown her; the look on Justin’s face, one of pure joy, when she told him; his proposal, dumb and naïve in an adorable way, down on one knee in the middle of an intra-town softball game; her wedding day, how handsome Justin looked, the pride on her mother’s face, the promise of happiness in her own soul. Please, stop! her mind screamed as tears cascaded down her cheeks. I don’t want what comes next!

  But there would be no stopping it.

  In a flash, Kyra was there on the day she was in the supermarket, shopping with her mother, when she felt wetness slide down her legs. She felt the dizziness that followed, and the flash of hazy and bright images that followed that, as she was rushed to the hospital with blood covering her lower body. She saw the doctor’s face as he said the words placental abruption and went on to tell her the worst part—that a sudden surge of amniotic fluid had caused her placenta to tear from the wall of her uterus, doing untold damage to her insides and killing her child. They had to remove a part of her uterus, he said, simply out of precaution.

  Kyra dropped her head in her hands and wept. She heard the doctor’s voice when he told her she’d never have children. She remembered how hard Justin had taken the news, becoming a shell of the m
an he was now that the thing he wished for most was gone. Whereas before he at least tried, in his big dumb way, after their loss he surrendered to apathy. Not that Kyra took it any better. She pulled away from her friends, her husband, her family, herself, her inner strength and naiveté gone for good. Her relationship with Justin crumbled but never ended, her insides healed but never functioned correctly again, which mirrored the way she felt about little Steven, the son she’d never have.

  She dropped her arm, letting the ultrasound photo dangle between her legs. Anger soon replaced sorrow, rearing its ugly head like an unwanted zit on prom night. She marched into the kitchen, flipped open the trashcan lid, and dropped the last remaining evidence of that sorrow in. There would be no more crying for past mistakes, no more giving in, no more giving up.

  Not today, anyway.

  * * *

  At six o’clock that evening, the telephone rang. Kyra pried herself away from the television and answered it, hoping it was the attorney she’d spoken to earlier calling her back.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Is this Mrs. Holcomb?” asked a man whose tenor seemed much too hesitant.

  ”It is. Who’s this?”

  “I’m Dr. Fitzsimmons, from Wentworth-Douglass…” His voice trailed off.

  “Wentworth-Douglass? As in the hospital?” she asked.

  “Uh, yes, ma’am.”

  “What’s this about?”

  The man cleared his throat and seemed to get his act together. “I’m calling about your husband, Mrs. Holcomb.”

  “Is he okay?” she asked, amazed she still felt a pang of concern.

  “Well…I would say…something happened today…something we need you to come down here and talk to us about. I can’t get into it over the phone. All I can tell you is that your husband is here and he’s stable. If you could please come down when you get a chance, we would really like to speak with you.”