Cursed Be the Child (14 page)

“It’s almost midnight!” Vicki shouted, rising from the living room sofa. “Without a word to me, you take off like Jack the Ripper’s after you, and then you come home like this!”

Warren put a finger to his lips. “Shh, hold it down, Vick. You’ll wake the kid.”

“No,” Vicki said, “no, I told you I wouldn’t go through scenes like this again, Warren. I’ve had enough of it.”

“Aw, poor Vicki had a real shit day.” With his thumb, he tapped himself on the chest. “Maybe my day wasn’t a passport to paradise, either, ever think of that? Of course not. What do you know about what it’s like to be me?”

Eyes blazing, Vicki said, “I know you, all right. You’re an alcoholic…”

“I’ll drink to that!”

“…and if that’s what you’ve chosen to be, that’s your decision. But you’ll do it without me.”

He couldn’t stop himself—and didn’t want to. “And you’ll get along without me very well, right?” He smiled. “I can name that tune in three notes. You’ll find some fine feller to keep you from the lonelies, a shoulder to cry on, someone to fill that empty space in your heart, and”—he winked—“and that ain’t all, folks.”

He made a show of scratching his head and raising an eyebrow, as though a thought had just at this moment occurred to him. “I never did ask. Was Greenfield, old Davey boy, my pal and my colleague, any good in the sack?”

Rage twisted Vicki’s face. “You…you…”

“Too bad you can’t swear worth a shit, Vicki,” Warren said. “You’d be surprised—times like this, it helps. But you’re just too goddamn nice to put dirty words into your mouth, aren’t you? You know, I never did figure out how Nelly Niceness wound up doing the dirty deed with David. That wasn’t
nice
now, was it?”

She took a step toward him and raised her hand.

Quietly, Warren said, “Going to slap my face, too?”

In slow motion, her arm dropped. Then she said, “You bastard!”

“See, sometimes it feels right to swear.”

She marched out of the living room. At the foot of the stairs, hand on the banister, she turned her head to look at him with cold detachment. With no expression in her voice, she said, “Don’t come up to bed, Warren. I’d rather wake up to find a corpse alongside me than you.”

“Hey, I live here too, sweetheart.”

“You take one step into the bedroom, and…”

“You’ll slap my face?”

“I’ll telephone the police.”

He thought about that. No sense bothering the police with a simple domestic disturbance. He was a public spirited citizen, a conscientious member of the community.

“Good night, dear,” he said, as Vicki started up the stairs. “Always enjoy our marital chitchats. And by the way, fuck you very much.”

He expected to hear the bedroom door slam, but he didn’t. Of course not. Vicki wouldn’t want to wake…

Missy! Jesus!

It was Missy who’d triggered this binge.

He ran his hand down his face. Oh, Jesus, he was seriously fucked up and not just booze fucked up.

Crazy-sick-nut-case fucked up.

All right, then… He’d spent the day trying to drown his problems, but he was alcohol courageous now.

He went into his study, turned on the light and sat at the desk. A sheet of paper was in the Underwood. There was nothing on it.

He pulled open the right-hand desk drawer and took out the pistol. The .25 caliber automatic felt small and perfect in his hand.

He didn’t doubt himself at all. He felt calm, almost relieved.

It was time for the truth.

He had…sexual desires…for children.

And that was all the reason anyone needed to put a bullet in his brain.

So, big deal! Everyone fantasizes. That can’t be changed. That’s the way it is. But he had never
done
anything.

And shit, he had never had fantasies about Missy. Missy was his kid, and he loved her, loved the hell out of her, loved her the way a father was meant to love a kid—and that was all there was to it.

But what was with Missy?

Hell, what was with him, turning it into something it wasn’t?

He decided he was okay—drunk as a skunk, but okay. He put the pistol back in the drawer. He didn’t need it. He was okay.

He told himself that with every step he took downstairs. It was his final thought as he passed out on the rec room sofa.

— | — | —

Fifteen

It was four in the morning. Vicki Barringer was asleep, dreaming she stood before the throne of the Lord. God was not white-robed and bearded, but looked something like Walter Cronkite, only with more compassionate, less analytical eyes. Vicki had a confession to make.

“I was unfaithful to my husband.”

“Yet he is still your husband, and you are yet his wife. Do what you must to earn your husband’s forgiveness, but first, you will have to forgive yourself,” God said in a pleasant voice that had no trace of thunder rumbling in it. God nodded, as though indicating she was to move along to the next item.

“I haven’t spoken in years to Carol Grace, my own sister,” Vicki said. “I’ve cut her out of my life. I hardly even think of her. I thought she was intolerant, but I’m being no less intolerant of her than I accused her of being of me.”

“Yet she is still your sister, and you are yet her sister. Love her so that she will love you.”

A deep calm settled on Vicki as she slept and dreamed and had moments of understanding. She said to God, “I turned away from You.”

God said, “But here I am. And I have not turned away from you.”

Four hours later, when the alarm buzzed, Vicki was not able to recall the details of her dream. However, she did feel a sense of peace within her, as though everything that was wrong in her life could be set right, as though there was always something she could rely on no matter what.

The child was not dreaming. She was not asleep, but neither was she awake. She was not Melissa Barringer. She understood that. She had no choice but to accept it and do what she had to do.

She slowly got out of bed. In the ethereal glow of the night light, she took off her underwear. Naked, she left the bedroom.

In the dark hall, she paused a moment, then moved to the stairs and descended without the need of holding onto the bannister.

In the kitchen, she did not turn on the light. She went to the counter and opened the drawer by the sink. Face expressionless, she took out a steak knife and touched the blade with her thumb. She rejected it. She chose a long carving knife.

The fingers of her right hand wrapped around the knife handle, she opened the door to the basement with her left. Soundless and surefooted, she walked down the stairs.

Warren lay snoring on the rec-room sofa.

She glided across the floor. With each step, she raised the knife a bit higher until it was right before her face, and she stood over Warren Barringer as his Adam’s apple bobbed with each breath he took.

— | — | —

Sixteen

“Evan?”

On his knees at the side of the bed, eyes red, lower lip chapped and scaly, Evan Kyle Dean did not respond to his name or the knock at the door. His hands were clasped for prayer, but he was not praying. A prayer came from the heart, but his heart was dead, a heavy black stone in his chest.

Across the room, the nine-inch color television on the dresser chattered away. Two women, their faces too pink, happily compared the absorbability of paper towels. He needed the television’s gibberish, since he couldn’t stand the awful silence of the room and the hurricane rushing—of the thousands of thoughts in his mind.

“Evan, may I come in?” Carol Grace called through the door.

“No,” he said. For the past week, they had not been sleeping together. She’d moved to one of the guest rooms.

“Are you all right, Evan?”

He heard the concern in her words. “Yes,” he lied. “I just need to be alone. I need to think.”

“Could I fix you breakfast?”

“No.” He had eaten—when was it?—yesterday? The food’s melted cellophane taste had sent him staggering to the bathroom to throw up.

In the eight days since he had broken down at True Witness Church, Evan Kyle Dean had lost 20 pounds. He had slept perhaps ten hours total. He could not turn off his mind. In all that time, minute by excruciating minute, thoughts raced through his brain like tracer bullets, but when he tried to catch one and hold it long enough to make some sense of it, it turned to smoke.

And he could not pray. He simply could not pray.

“Evan, are you sure…”

“Please, just let me be!” he curtly called out, instantly regretting it. He suppressed a groan, as with his hands on the unmade bed, he lifted himself to his feet.

Retying the belt of the blue terry cloth robe he wore over his pajamas, he went to the door and opened it.

The sickly, frightened look on Carol Grace’s face knifed into him, cutting into his own pain and adding to it. He tried to smile. “I…I’m sorry, dear,” he said. “I don’t mean to be short with you.”

“Evan,” Carol Grace said, “we have to…”

“See a doctor?” he concluded the sentence for her. “Or a psychiatrist?” He gave a snort of mirthless laughter. “No, dear, this is something I have to work out on my own.”

Unlike numerous others who healed through God’s power, or claimed to, Evan Kyle Dean did not disparage doctors and psychiatrists. Their minds and their talents were God-given, and in their own ways, they were as much God’s workers as any preacher who cast out unclean spirits by the power of the Holy Name. But a doctor’s task was to heal afflictions of the body, and a psychiatrist’s, afflictions of the mind.

His affliction was of the soul.

“Carol Grace,” Evan said softly, “my own wife, good and true.” He gently took her face in his hands. “Our union is based on trust, our trust in one another”—his mouth was dry “—and our trust in God. What’s happened…what is happening to me is part of the Lord’s plan. I know that. I don’t understand it yet, but I trust Him. I beg you to trust me now. And to remember that I love you.”

The smile she tried did not quite work. “All right, then,” she said, “I’m going to the store. While I’m out, I think it would be good for you to get cleaned up and dressed.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “I’ve been brooding. I need to get on with the business of living.”

“Good,” Carol Grace said, “and when I come home, I’ll put together a nice breakfast for us.”

“Yes,” he said, although bile rose in his throat.

He sat in the chair by the bedroom window, watching Carol Grace take the Lincoln out of the garage and carefully back down the long, winding, tree-lined driveway. The Lincoln, this year’s model, was one of their three cars—three cars for the two of them. He often found himself missing the old Chevrolet Impala, even with its 112,000 miles, most of them tallied up in taking the message “God is love” from one small town to another back in the old days. The Chevy had performed beautifully. It was a faithful servant.