Fear Itself (20 page)

I was panicked and my heart was pounding like a snare-drum and my image in the mirror was horrifying; the hair on my naked body was matted down by the thin basting of blood that covered me from head to toe. I looked as though I had bathed in a tub of claret.

I crawled from the toilet to the tub and I put the rubber stopper in the drain and I turned the handle to the hot water on full. I got to my feet and I stumbled to the kitchen, steadying myself on the bathroom doorframe, and then grabbed a large black garbage bag from under the kitchen sink and I scrambled back to my bedroom and latched the door from within. The knife made a blood-curdling meaty noise

(like the sound of a large chilled shrimp as you bite into it) when I pulled the knife from Amber’s chest. I rolled her body up in the blood-soaked blanket that covered the bed and I pushed her onto the floor (to the side of the bed opposite the door) with a low thud so that the whole mess would be hidden from view should Sarah enter the room (at that point I thought that Melanie had committed the murder). I flipped the mattress over on the bed-frame and I pulled some clean linen from my dresser and I made the bed up with a fresh blanket. I wrapped the pillows into the bed sheet and I bundled them and stuffed them into the garbage bag and I pulled the yellow drawstring and tied it shut. I took a brand new quilt, a thick dark blue comforter still wrapped in cellophane, from my closet and I stretched it out on the bedroom floor. I rolled Amber’s body, bloody quilt and all, into the clean blue comforter and I shoved it up against the bed once again on the side opposite the door.

Back in the kitchen I found a bottle of citrus cleaner and a roll of paper towels. I returned to the bedroom and I wiped the blood from the bed frame and the wall and the nightstand and the alarm clock which showed the time, in red boxed LED letters, to be eight twenty-seven in the morning. I sprayed the kitchen knife with the citrus cleaner and I wiped the blood from the blade and the handle and then I wiped the hardwood floor from my bare footprints at the bed and through the hallway and the living room and the kitchen and all the way to the bathroom, around the toilet and over to the tub. The whole house smelled like a citrus grove.

I went back to the bedroom and closed the door and I slipped back into the bathroom and fell into our tiny tub and I tried to soak the death from my body and melt the stress that was balled up in my abdomen. The water turned red as soon as I sank myself into the balmy stew. I washed my hair and scrubbed my skin with a soapy washcloth and I ground my fingernails into the green bar of soap to loosen the blood that had seeped beneath them. But I still didn’t feel free of the death so I drained the tub and drew a new bath and I washed myself all over again.

I knew that no matter how many baths I took that the feeling was not going to leave me. It wasn’t the blood on my skin that was causing the wretched feeling in my stomach, it was the death; the second death in my own bed in twelve months time. Death was following me. I felt like Angela Lansbury in an episode of “Murder She Wrote”. Death was waiting for me at every turn. I began to wonder if the demons that haunted me in the dark might not be real. I wondered if I was cursed. I wondered what it was that I had done to provoke my god to torture me so.

This is going to sound a bit cold- hearted, but there was a rather urgent problem I needed to solve. As I sat soaking the death from my body I also thought about more pressing practical issues like what I was going to do with Amber’s body. I couldn’t keep it. It wasn’t the sort of thing one kept lying around and it would have begun to decompose in a few days and the smell would have become unbearable. I could have buried it, I supposed, but buried bodies always seemed to pop up out of the ground and bring policemen trailing behind them and that wouldn’t do either. Same thing went for dumping the body in the river. I could have dumped it on Melanie’s doorstep and let her deal with her own mistake, but that would not have been chivalrous and it would ultimately have led the police to me anyway. I could have buried it in the basement but the other tenant might wonder why I was jack- hammering the concrete in the basement floor. I was stuck with Amber even after she was dead. The bitch just wouldn’t let me be.

And then it came to me like a cold crystalline flake of snow drifting slowly to the ground; a faint wisp of an idea. An insane thought, I supposed, but it was the only semi- logical idea I could summon. I would return her, like an unwanted gift. I would deliver

Amber back to where she had come. I would give her back, anonymously of course, to her husband. I would drive her home.

Looking back on the idea, it was a ludicrous solution. But I was under an incredible amount of stress. My life was at stake. My thinking wasn’t all that lucid. In hindsight I should have buried her in the basement or wrapped her up and encased her inside of a concrete wall. But even though things were rather sour towards the end, and even though she used me like a blow-up doll, we did sleep together as lovers before our relationship evolved into the twisted affair that it ended up to be. I just couldn’t bring myself to disrespect her remains in such a way. And her family; her children, deserved closure. Besides, I figured if they had a body they wouldn’t come looking for her in my house.

The knot in my stomach didn’t disappear altogether, but the twisting in the base of my gut, like the wringing of water from a wet shirt, had stopped wrenching tighter. My idea was so ludicrous that I thought it might actually work. If I returned the body from where it came they wouldn’t know where she had been killed. There was, of course, the chance that Amber had told her sister where she was going, but probably not specifically. My house was addressed to Melanie. And Amber didn’t likely have anything with my address on it. And then again Amber might not have told her sister anything at all. In any event my options were limited and I had little to lose in the effort.

Having resolved the issue, in my mind at least, I arose from the tub with the energy garnered from discerning a clear plan of action.

I realized that as disturbed as I was by Amber’s death, not to mention having slept with her bloodied body next to mine for god knows how many hours, that the knot in my stomach was more the product of my indecision and fear than the horror of the event. I felt more than just a little bit liberated. I even began to feel flattered that Melanie had killed Amber on my behalf. She had killed out of jealousy as I saw it, and no matter how ugly a beast jealousy can be, let me tell you that it can have a powerful affect on the subject’s ego. I was actually lifted emotionally. Through all of the misery I had experienced over the previous six months I had been relieved of an extraordinary burden with Amber’s death and I had a lover in Melanie who would kill for me. I actually started to whistle happily as I dressed and despite the smell of death that still thickened the air I cooked a hearty breakfast of French-toast, potato pancakes and fried ham and eggs.

It was then that I noticed Amber’s purse sitting on the kitchen chair. I quickly grabbed it and bolted to the bedroom. Amber would certainly not have left her purse behind. I had to pack it into the plastic garbage bag with all of the other bloody objects. But before I could shove her purse into the bag I noticed the corner of a white envelope sticking out of a side pocket and curiosity got the best of me. Inside the envelope was a letter addressed to both Melanie and me. It read:

Dearest Melanie and Mathew,

Sorry to be such a rotten bitch! I hope the two of you fuck each other until death do you part. It was fun while it lasted. If you ever need a third don’t hesitate to call.

Love Amber.

I was shocked. The heartless bitch had a heart after all. Her spending the night was her version of a fond farewell. The ass raping she had given me was not the kindest send-off I could have hoped for, but she was planning to set me free. I suddenly felt guilty for feeling glee at her demise.

I restored the letter to the envelope and slipped it into my shirt pocket and I reached into Amber’s purse and found her cell phone. I removed it and put it into my pants pocket. I would need to destroy it (it contained my phone number). Then I shoved her purse into the garbage bag and I hurried back to the kitchen and tended the skillet.

I was in the midst of cooking breakfast, the realization that Amber’s body lay cold and stiff no more than thirty feet from where I stood no longer the arduous burden it once seemed, when Melanie came trundling up the kitchen stairs.

“Good morning.” I turned and smiled at her and then returned to my cooking but in the flash glance that I had taken I realized instantly that Melanie didn’t look at all herself. Why should she? She had killed someone and it was playing on her mind as it would any sane person. I turned off the burner on the stove and I slid the last few pieces of French-toast onto the serving plate and I sat it on the table; then I removed my apron, a full-length white chef’s smock that Melanie had brought from home at some point over the recent months, and I turned back to Melanie to give her my full attention. Her eyes had bags under them from lack of sleep. She wore no makeup. Her hair was disheveled as were her clothes, the very same clothes she had worn on the previous night. Despite the horrible act she had committed, an act of love as far as I was concerned, I saw nothing but her beauty.

She spoke in a low almost inaudible baritone growl, “Where is that
cunt
?”

“What?” My head involuntarily twitched to the side. Her words did not register but her anger was pervasive.

“Where is she?”

“She’s…” I turned my head toward the bedroom, and then I looked back at her as I swallowed hard and felt the swell of my Adams apple rise like a grating lump of dung being forced from a rectum, “in the bedroom, where you… left her.” I stuttered. I was confused. What a ridiculous question, I thought. My brain was having trouble deciphering the meaning of her words.

I took a long hard look at Melanie as I tried to elucidate her disposition. She looked absolutely miserable and full of rage and anger and hate. Her eyes were narrow and focused and her brow was wrinkled in a stressed pattern of ripples as though she had used an eyebrow pencil to stencil multiple lines of musical notes across her forehead. But despite the fact that she still wore the same clothes as she had the day before there was no indication that she had stabbed someone to death; no blood splatters or ripped seams. She stormed past me, breathing through her nostrils like a bull seeing red, and stomped through the living room and into the hallway. I trailed behind her and watched like a spectator at a bullfight as she forcefully thrust the bedroom door open and then turned back to face me.

“Don’t fuck with me.” She growled, “Where is she?”

I was beginning to get the impression that Melanie hadn’t killed Amber after all. She didn’t appear to have a clue that Amber was dead. I didn’t know whether or not I should explain to her that Amber had been murdered; that she lay cold and hard and grey and wrapped neatly in a blue blanket just a few feet in front of her. My mind was racing, trying to figure out what exactly was happening. It was at that moment that my stomach wrenched in pain as I realized that Sarah had done the murder. She had killed Amber in her sleep. Her words from the night before echoed in my hollowed head “What if she dies?” I wondered, should I tell Melanie? Or would she
freak
? And even if, in the midst of her tempest, she rejoiced in Amber’s demise, would she, upon recapitulation,
freak
? Would she wonder if I hadn’t killed both Amber and my wife and was shamefully trying to blame those barbaric acts on sweet innocent Sarah? And if I told her the truth, that Sarah was a sociopath, and she believed me; would she be able to look at Sarah lovingly as she so often had?

“She must have…left.” My words fumbled from my lips like the wobbly footfalls of a toddler taking its first steps.

“Her…
car…
is…still…parked…
outside

!” Her words were deliberate and spaced in a steady, angry, impatient rising pitch.

I could feel my brow furrow in fear and shame at having been caught in an obvious lie. I scanned my brain for a sequential and logical fabrication. “She…was waiting for her sister to pick her up…her…car wouldn’t start. She’s going to have it towed.” I finished with conviction. “She must have left while I was in the bathroom.”

Melanie’s face melted, “I can’t take this anymore.” She started to sob and I watched as her knees began to wobble and I was sure that they would collapse beneath her weight.

“It’s okay.” I stepped forward to catch her before she melted into the floor. Her face was now filled with anguish and despair. She was experiencing actual physical pain. I wanted to waive a magic wand and rid her of her agony. I wanted to take her in my arms, like an infant, and comfort her and let her know that it would all work out.

“No, I can’t do this anymore.” She sobbed; but even as she said this she wrapped her arms around my neck and collapsed her face into my chest. “I can’t go on like this…with you
fucking
her and I pretending like nothing is happening. I just can’t be with you anymore.”

“It’s okay.” I whispered, “You don’t have to worry about Amber any longer.” I slipped my hand beneath her shirt and I gently stroked the baby-soft skin of her back, “I told her that it was over.”

“Really?” Her sobish tone hinted at hope and relief.”

“She said she understood. That she was sorry for having treated you so badly and for forcing me to…sleep with her. We didn’t even sleep together last night.” Melanie hugged me tight. “She slept in my bed and I slept on the couch.” I looked at the couch. Sarah had apparently gone to her bed after she had finished her evenings work and had abandoned the pillow and blanket I had used to make her comfortable. It looked as if I had actually slept on the couch.

“I love you Mathew. I love you so much.” She wrapped her arms around me and buried her head in my chest once again.

“And I love you.” I said to her for the first time. And I did love her; perhaps not with the totality that I had loved Catherine or the unconditional component with which I loved