Her Story (2 page)

“You’re late,” he growled, as she meekly slid onto the stool next to him.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry John.”

“It wouldn’t kill you to be on time ya’ know. It also wouldn’t kill you to”

“Not going to happen,” she cut him off.  She refused to call him dad. He shrugged. It wasn’t going to stop him from trying.

The waitress walked up, placed a fresh cup of coffee in front of her and poured hot coffee from an overused pot into John’s cup. “The usual?” She asked. They both nodded and she turned on her heels, back to the kitchen to write up their ticket. Nothing here ever changed, and that was what they both liked about it. She grabbed the sugar shaker and poured a solid three count into the cup steaming in front of her.

“That shit’ll rot your teeth.”

“So will meth,” she replied with a smirk.

“Smartass.”

They stared ahead at the tiny TV broadcasting some local Sunday morning news. In silence. The way they both liked it. It was starting off just like every other Sunday morning. She hoped it would stay that way. He never called her, not even on weeks when he had been unable to make it. But he had called her and told her they had something important to discuss this week. And she planned on avoiding whatever it was he wanted to discuss for as long as possible.

He cleared his throat.

“Can’t you at least wait til I’ve had my goddamn eggs?”

“Aren’t we touchy this morning?” he replied sarcastically. “Late night, was it?”

“I was working.”

“I’m sure you were. But it’s your extracurricular activities that worry me a bit more.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re one to talk.”

The waitress returned, dropping their respective meals in front of them. “Enjoy,” she said, robotically. They began shoveling their food into their faces equally as robotically. His runny, over-easy eggs grossed her out. She just stared at her scrambled ones and tried to choke it down. She also couldn’t stand watching other people eat. That’s half the reason they sat at the counter, so she could just stare straight ahead without having to worry about her gaze crossing the open mouth of another patron. Their waitress – what was her name? Lori? Laura? – came by and refreshed their coffees. She automatically reached for the sugar shaker. He shot her a sideways glance.

This is how their Sundays went. And this is how she wanted them to say. But he cleared his throat, wiped his mouth, making sure he got every bit of egg out of his moustache, tossed the used napkin on his now empty plate and shoved it away from him. She knew whatever he had wanted to talk about was about to be discussed.

“So, I’ve been thinking,” he started, pausing again to clear his throat. “I think it’s time you gave up this bartending crap. You’ve gotta get serious. Settle down. Quit rolling out of bed looking like a damn raccoon.”

She reached for the reflective napkin holder and brought it up to her face to use as a mirror, wiping under her eyes. She definitely should’ve gotten up earlier and done some damage control.

“Is that it?” she asked. “That was the big discussion you wanted to have this morning? You wanted to tell me to get my shit together?” She said this with a sarcastic twinge in her voice, primarily because it was hard to take him seriously when he talked about this sort of thing.

“Will you let me finish? Jesus Christ, getting all riled up for no reason. No, that’s not what I wanted you talk to you about, but watching you barrel in here like a damn train wreck week after week – I can’t keep sitting by and watching you flush all your potential down the drain,” he said.

Potential? What potential? She was the product of this absentee, who had all of a sudden contacted her out of the blue when she was 16, and an alcoholic mother, who had died about 5 years ago from – surprise, surprise – complications related her to cirrhotic liver. She had barely graduated from high school. The fact that she had started working the second she had turned 16, primarily to make sure she could at least buy something to eat when her mother had spent her entire paycheck on booze, probably had something to do with that.

She didn’t even know what to say to him. She had only ever seen him once a week, for a few hours at most, the first few months of which they spent in awkward silence with forced conversations about how her classes were going and how the Red Sox had performed that week. She spent those first years choking on dozens of questions: Where had he been? Why had he abandoned her? Why on Earth did he want to start a relationship now? How did he find her? She had never asked him and had gotten various answers from her mother, depending on her level of alcohol consumption at the given time.

But what was he getting at here? While her mind was racing with a million different responses, to this sudden attempt at parenting that was about two decades too late, she kept her mouth shut. She knew her voice would shake and that was something she definitely wanted to avoid. Once she started to get upset, her emotions just started to spiral, and it was nearly impossible to get them quickly under control. This personality trait was unfortunately one of the few qualities she had inherited from her mother. She just sat there like a scolded puppy, waiting for him to continue.

Clearing his throat, yet again, he pulled something out of his jacket pocket. “Here,” he said, handing her an overstuffed, crumpled envelope. She shot him a sideways glance as she flipped it over, unfolded the flap on the pack. She pulled out a wad of folded papers. She scanned them briefly and just looked up at him, confused.

“What the fuck is this?” she asked.

“My will. And my life insurance policy.”

“Yeah no, I can see that. Why are you giving this to me?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he replied, nonchalantly, dismissing her question with a shrug of his shoulders. He turned back to his coffee. She just stared at him, mouth open. She knew he could feel her staring at him. He squirmed a bit, shifting his weight and doing his best to ignore her.

“Seriously? You’re just going to hand this to me and not… say… anything?” There was that quiver she had been trying to avoid. “What – are you dying or something?” He just dropped his head.

“Do you gotta go and get all emotional about it? Of course I’m dying! We’re all dying. The docs just said I sped up the process by chain smoking for the last 50 years. Not much they can do about it now.” Another shrug.

“So this is what? Your way of making amends for abandoning me to be raised by some random drunk you knocked up? This is your way of being a parent – showing up after I’m already fucked beyond repair and throwing some snide comments and money at me? I’m a bartender. I’m a train wreck. I’m the product of an alcoholic and a…a… a whatever the hell you are!” She could feel the eyes of the few other patrons turn toward them and she could feel the volume of her voice rising. “Let me tell you something – keep it. Keep all of it. Keep your will. Keep your Sundays. Keep yourself out of my life.” She stood to leave.

“Will you quit being so fucking dramatic already? Jesus. Sit down.” She begrudgingly obeyed. But she wouldn’t look at him. She refused to look at him. “What did you want me to do, huh? Just wait and not say anything, have you show up here to wait for me, having no idea they already buried me? Huh? Or what, you wanted a phone call from my lawyer?”

She knew he was right. But that didn’t change how upset she was, how unexplainably betrayed she felt. These Sundays had been the most consistent thing in her life, the only routine she had, and soon they were going to end. From the way John had made it sound, he could drop dead any day. Where would he be when it happened? Where would she be? Would he be alone? Would anyone even think to let her know? She realized now how little she knew about him, or, well, about his current life. He had shared select stories from his past with her, and she had discerned some information from comments and facts he had casually dropped into conversation. But did he live alone? Did he have a wife that was taking care of him, that would be there if and when something happened to him? These were questions, in all honesty, she had avoided asking for years, not really wanting to know the answers.

But now they were the only thing she could think about. She thought about them on her way home from the diner. She thought about them as she crawled back in between the sheets, glad that last night’s visitor had seen himself out while she was gone. She thought about them as she slogged through her shift at the bar. She thought about them as she navigated the dark city streets on her way home, grateful that on Sunday nights the bar was closed by 10 p.m. She thought about them right up until a young girl ran out of nowhere and in front of her car. She swerved hard to the left to avoid her. And drove straight into oncoming traffic.

Chapter 3

She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there, knees pulled in to her chest, huddled in the corner, rocking back and forth. She hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on. Back and forth, back and forth. She pressed her forehead into her knees and wrapped her arms tighter around her shins. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to shower. She knew she wasn’t ready to do either of those things yet.

Her muscles ached. Her stomach was in knots. Her mind was foggy. One realization, however, made her stomach drop. She hadn’t locked the door. Bolting up much faster than her protesting body would have liked, her head became light as she clumsily hurried down the hall toward the front door. Door knob, dead bolt, second dead bolt. Click, click, click, one right after the other. A wave of unexplainable relief overcame her as she slumped back down onto the floor. She cupped her face in her hands, trying to make the room stop spinning. They smelled like wet dirt and drying blood. The smell triggered an overwhelming copper taste in the back of her mouth. Frantically, she crawled as fast as she could toward the bathroom, making it with just enough time to throw back the lid of the toilet before what little she had eaten that day was immediately propelled from her stomach.

After she had finally stopped retching and her body stopped shaking, she pulled herself up to the sink and splashed cool water onto her face. Before even reaching for a towel, she slid her hand across the wall and flipped the first light switch her fingers came across. What she saw in the mirror was actually worse than she had expected. Staring straight forward, she focused on the reflection of her nose, the one area of her face that seemed untouched, and slowly loosened her focus, assessing the damage as she went.

Her right cheek had survived with only a few cuts and scrapes, but one small glance to the left and she could tell her cheekbone was broken. It had already begun to swell, causing her left eye to look sunken and lost; the white behind that hazel iris now completely red from what she could only assume was a broken blood vessel, likely obtained from the same backhand that had shattered her cheekbone. Her bangs were matted to her forehead by a mix of sweat and dirt. Her lip was split right down the middle. She vaguely remembered biting it. Looking down at her hands, she realized why the smell of dirt and blood had been so strong when she had brought them to her face. Cuts of various size and depth covered her palms and the backs of her hands. Several knuckles were still slowly secreting blood. Almost all of her fingernails were broken, some missing completely, and at least two fingers on her right hand were so swollen she couldn’t imagine they weren’t broken. She couldn’t examine herself any further. The sight of her battered body was beginning to make her nauseous.

Turning her back to the mirror, she reached in to the shower and turned the hot water up as high as it would go. Slowly and carefully she began to remove what was left of her clothes. Her t-shirt, ripped and bloody, her jeans, covered in dirt and soaked with sweat, fell to the floor in a heap that looked as tattered and torn as she felt. Afraid her legs wouldn’t support her on the slippery surface of the shower, she pulled the shower curtain back and sat down immediately in the back of the bathtub. The water stung her skin as it slowly began to attack the outer layer of grime she felt encased in. She watched the water race toward the drain in brown swirls, and again pulled her knees in to her chest.

As steam quickly began to fill the tiny bathroom, she finally allowed herself to ponder the most disturbing, yet most obvious question; how the hell had this happened?

Chapter 4

The next thing she knew, she opened her eyes to see strangers standing above her, poking and prodding. And she was moving. Or, well, being moved. The generic fluorescent overhead lights beamed down on her as a sea of white coats and blue scrubs ebbed and flowed over the railings on either side of her. She slowly began to realize more and more about her surroundings. She couldn’t move her neck. Or her head. Or her arms. At first this made her panic, and that’s when those around her realized she was awake and started to ask her questions. Did she know where she was? Could she feel various pokes and prods? Follow the light that was pointed directly at her pupils. Squeeze this hand or that hand. They wheeled her in between two blue curtains and started hooking her up to all kinds of machines.