Episode 2
1 Month Later
Friday Evening
Oil City, PA
John Walker had a nightmare. He had been having them on and off for months, and even though each time they were different, he somehow knew that they were tapped from the same morose well. Until this particular night, all had dealt with his immediate family, but this one took the form of his grandfather Amos. While fishing together off a pier on a gloomy autumn day, something began to tug violently at Amos’ fishing line. He fought it for a moment but was suddenly swept away. And though John was an excellent swimmer, his feet seemed glued to the pier, unable to respond to his grandfather’s cry for help as the swift currents repeatedly sucked him under the surface of the water.
Even in his dream John’s heart milled painfully within his chest and a surreal dampness moistened his fisted palms. The anger of helplessness, even in his own dream, and the fear of never seeing his grandfather again brought tears to his eyes. He wailed until he was hoarse and pulled with all his might, but nothing would loosen the invisible shackles from his legs.
With his face twisted in fear and pain, the old man sunk beneath the watery blanket one last time. With that, John finally freed himself and rushed down the rocky shore of the river to where he had seen his grandfather go under and dove into the muddy water. Relentlessly, he dived under for minutes at a time trying to catch a glimpse of Amos. He reached out wildly into the murky, pea-green water, hoping against hope to feel his way to his grandfather, but each swipe came back empty.
Exhausted and fearful of succumbing to the river’s appetite for human life himself, and with no more sign of Amos dead or alive, John crawled back to shore and rested on the marbled rocks in the knee-deep water and sobbed with guilt. He was unable to save his grandfather, the dear, old man who’d raised him almost his entire life, just like he’d been unable to save his marriage.
Suddenly, something grabbed his ankle so tightly that it sent a shockwave of pain up his entire leg and began to pull him into the deeper water. As he resisted with everything he had, the head of something that queerly resembled Amos’ bloated and fish-bitten face broke the surface and smiled malignantly as he pulled John out into the depths. “I’m taking you with me,” it said, and pulled John under.
The fear of drowning and the thought of where his nightmare might take him next sprang him from his dream like a cat on amphetamines. He was breathing rapidly and drenched in a cold sweat. He sat up in the bed and looked around the shadowed room apprehensively in an attempt to decipher if he was alone or if the nightmare phantasm had somehow supernaturally found its way to the world of the living to take him back. As his eyes adjusted, he realized that it looked no different than when sleep had taken him.
Struggling to shake off the last of the grisly vision and make some sense of it, he wiped his clammy face on the sleeve of his pajama top and turned on his side to face the lamp stand. The digital clock glowed a green-yellow 10:30 p.m. An hour and a half since he forced himself into bed.
In the blackness that clothed the room, with the proficiency of a nocturnal animal, he pulled from his bed-side stand a bottle of Scotch and a small shot glass that he had put there earlier, being careful not to clank the two together. For some time, the Scotch had become the method of preference for falling asleep when his mind wanted to attend to other matters. He quietly poured a shot and downed a bitter-hot swill of the liquid sunshine, as Amos had called it.
The morbid phantasm behind him now, he took two slow, deep breaths and quietly put the bottle and shot glass away. John reassured himself that it was just a dream. He’d had worse ones, he tried to convince himself.
He knew that his grandfather hadn’t drowned as the dream so vividly portrayed. A heart attack had claimed the dear old man. He’d been called out of the classroom during his lecture on post-World War One Europe to be told of the disheartening news. Already dismayed from trials closer to home, he’d decided to take some time away from teaching to prepare for the funeral and take care of estate matters, though not much really needed tending to; the time away was more for himself.
Now, with the nightmare still marked indelibly in his mind, he couldn’t resist the urge to check up on his two children, Abbey and John Jr.--twins. He snuck out of the bedroom door, being careful to keep its creaks to a minimum, and tip toed down the hall to their bedroom. He peaked his head into their room. The moon that seemed to hang just outside their bedroom window cast a soft, silver-yellow glow across their bed. They looked so peaceful. Just seeing them helped chase the sadness and haunting thoughts away.
Though he resisted himself to do so, John even looked in on his soon-to-be ex-wife who slept in the bedroom next to his. His heart fluttered and his breath caught in his throat as he touched the doorknob to her room. It felt cold, almost as cold as she did. The image of seeing her skirt hiked up with another man between her legs still troubled him. He half expected to find someone in there sleeping next to her, but he looked in on a single body covered by a rose comforter, heard the slow rhythms of sleep.
He sighed softly and closed the door.
So, in his grandfather’s bedroom, in his grandfather’s house, John Walker tried as best he could to silently prepare himself for his grandfather’s funeral the next day.
For the rest of the night, he stared up at the ceiling, blankets pulled up to his chin, remembering what it was like before his world had fallen apart and asking himself if it could get any worse.
Sandy Ayotte sat in an old, rocker-recliner that had been frayed and worn from too many years of use and peered wearily out her apartment window at the black velvet night. Over the tops of the old, worn buildings across the street and the steep ridges of the Allegheny plateau that girded the small town, the stars glimmered with pin-prick lights, and the waning gibbous moon stood a low guard on the horizon, signaling that daybreak wasn’t that far off.
Though she didn’t need to be up for at least another three hours to get ready for work, she couldn’t sleep. Her ears still rang from the deafening music, and the headache it brought on couldn’t be touched with Tylenol. The band in the bar below her apartment had stopped playing only after two encores—2:30 a.m. She despised having to live there, but it was all she could afford for now.
As she stared out into the night, Sandy asked herself—and any omniscient power that just happened to be
listening—if this was all her life was ever going to amount to. That seemed to be the topic of choice as of late, and she hated to drown herself in self-pity, but she figured that she would allow herself that occasional luxury since no one else seemed to give a damn.
She heard the familiar sound of a car making its way along the avenue below her, a solitary disturbance in the early morning hours.
A gentle breeze shook the window pane.
A few moments after the car faded into the night wind, she sighed and got up from the chair. No sense looking out at the beautiful evening, that only made her feel lonelier, since she had no one to share it with.
Stop it! she scolded herself. You're better than that . . . tougher than that.
As she walked in darkness across her living room/dining room/kitchen back to the bathroom, her foot brushed up against something furry that suddenly moved at her intrusion. It gave a reprimanding meow.
“Oh, sorry Sylvester. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
He just arched his back and yawned lazily, then brushed his sleek, black torso against her leg with repeated sweeps as if to say, you woke me, now pet me.
She picked him up, nuzzled him against her chest and went into the bathroom to get ready for work that was still over four hours away.
The light clicked on, revealing a tiny, threadbare room bathed in ugly turquoise. The bathroom floor was tattered linoleum that at one time used to be bright yellow but had since faded to a color that Sandy could not recognize. The plaster was chipping in places along the wall, the white enamel on both the tub and the sink was stained a dingy orange-brown-red from hard water stains, and the upper right corner of the medicine cabinet mirror was cracked. Its only decor was a picture of a beautiful, Hawaiian sunset hanging to the right of the mirror and a clear, glass
bowl full of pastel-colored seashells that sat atop the toilet tank—an admittedly feeble attempt to give the room at least a little semblance of comfort.
Sandy put Sylvester down and looked into the mirror, trying not to focus too much on the room. With the kind of life she had led thus far, an apartment such as this should not have bothered her in the least. In fact, it wasn’t even the worst place she’d lived in. She had always supported all the men in her life with whatever menial labor she could find in the small town, and both mental and physical abuse was their way of showing gratitude. The relationships never started out that way, but inevitably that’s how they all ended. And because of their acquiescence to let the
government—and Sandy—provide for them instead of going out and making a living on their own, places such as the one she now resided were the only thing they could afford.
But now, having resolved to start over, wiping the slate clean, and with a good
job—better than any previous one—she was actually starting to put a little structure into her once chaotic life. Soon she would be able to afford a better place. That much did make her feel better.
As the cat pressed for more attention, she quickly undressed and started the bath water, feeling for the right temperature--somewhere between chilly and numbing cold. Sandy then turned back to the sink to brush her teeth while the tub filled. The image staring back at her from the mirror appalled her, and she turned away. She hated seeing herself naked.
The burn scars along the right side of her neck that spidered down to her elbow were a constant reminder of the life she so desperately sought to leave behind. They were a gift from her
latest—and thankfully failed—attempt at a relationship. The loser now shared the dirt with worms and snails and a thousand other rotting bodies in Mt. Calvary cemetery. His name was Ronny, and his favorite baseball team had just dropped the first game of a double-header when she came home from her newest job as a housekeeper for the local hotel. Since he couldn’t break the umpire’s jaw for his obvious witlessness on a correct strike zone, he’d decided to procure his anger on someone closer to home.
Without even so much as a hello when she entered, he got up from the couch, grabbed her by her arm and forcefully pushed her into the kitchen to make him dinner while he resumed his seat as judge in front of the television and cursed and damned all the
ball players—as well as the umpire—to Hell.
As she boiled some water to make spaghetti, she began telling him how her first day had gone. How everyone had been very nice to work with. How one of the hotel’s guests had even complimented her on how spotless the room was when they came back from breakfast, trying to calm him down, desperately trying to find anything, any topic that wouldn’t give him an excuse to beat her. Evidently, she had picked the wrong one.
With his team losing again and a lack of anything else better to do, he thought she was throwing in his face the fact that she was working and he wasn’t and decided to teach her a valuable lesson in the art of ego protection. Part of the lesson dealt with fists to the stomach and back of the head, another dealt with kicks to the lower back, and being the wonderful teacher that he was, the last dealt with a pot of boiling water down the right side of her body. She had managed to avoid most of the scalding liquid, saving her face and most of her body, but it wasn’t enough to avoid serious tissue damage on her neck and arm.
He called an ambulance, then left before the authorities arrived.
She never even got the enjoyment of watching him hang for what he’d done to her. Days later, as she lay in an I.C.U burn unit at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, she received word that the police had found him floating in the Allegheny river. He’d been partying with some friends near the river’s edge, and in a drunken stupor tried to prove he could swim across. He never made it.
After having acquainted herself with Death, and during her subsequent (and slow) recovery from the burns, she took a job as an administrative assistant at Westinger Funeral Home, making arrangements with hospitals for the pick up and transport of the deceased, made appointments, answered the telephone and attended funerals for general help and a comforting face for those who might have otherwise been the only people to attend for someone who had little surviving family.
It was a good move financially and emotionally. It paid more than what she would have made as a housekeeper, and she seemed to heal from her emotional scars faster by helping make life marginally easier for those aching from the loss of a loved one.
Now with a funeral later that morning to prepare for, Sandy quickly brushed her teeth without another glance in the mirror. Afterwards, she crawled into the cold bath water. She loathed hot water. It made her nauseous.
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