Goody One Shoe (18 page)

JANIS JONES BACKED OUT
of her
driveway and pulled onto the road, wipers at full tilt against the driving
rain. Nothing douses the media fire better than time and bad weather.

Once the Crown Prosecutor announced that no charges would be
brought, that there was insufficient evidence in the deaths of her first two
children to prove any wrongdoing, the media began to lose interest. Each day,
bodies and cameras would trickle off her lawn. As of yesterday morning, they
were gone. Only squashed roses and footprints in the grass remained as proof
they were ever there at all.

Janis missed them. Missed the attention. What was that old
saying? No such thing as bad press? Well, that’s a load of bull. Everywhere she
went people pointed and whispered. Women gripped their children as if Janis
would snatch them and drown them in the bathtub just for shits and giggles.

She wasn’t a monster, for God’s sake.

A frail figure limped along the gravel shoulder, one hand
gripping a cane, back hunched, hood protecting him from the downpour. Why was
this old man walking all the way out here? In this weather? Perhaps he was
lost. Or worse, had dementia and had wandered away from home.

She glanced at the clock. Therapy didn’t start for forty
minutes. She did have some time to spare. Could forgo the usual three-pump,
double-shot vanilla-bean latte and help the old dude out instead. Or just be
late for the stupid appointment. She didn’t need it. Didn’t want it. But it
helped to keep up the grieving mother façade. One side of her mouth turned up.
She’d show her bastard husband that she was a decent person. Show the whole
damn world.

She pulled up beside the drenched old fart and slowed. His
face was shielded against the storm by the hood of his insufficient
windbreaker. She depressed a button on the armrest of her door and the
passenger window rolled down.

“Hey, mister,” she yelled against the rain pounding on the
roof of her Escalade. “Want a ride?” She plucked her purse from the leather
passenger seat and tossed it into the empty baby seat strapped in back.

He fumbled the door open, and slid his wet, brittle figure
onto the leather seat.

Janis winced. She should have thought this through. Now
she’d have to get her car detailed. Get the old-man stench out. But first, the
good deed. She turned the radio off, extinguishing the lyrics of Fiona Apple’s
Hot
Knife,
and clicked on the seat heater. “Nasty day. Where are you headed?”

He mumbled something.

“I’m sorry, where? Can you speak up? The rain, it’s so
loud.” She glanced at his exposed hand, stared at the unexpected sight. It was
too feminine, too smooth. The skin wasn’t rice-paper-thin, the knuckles not
gnarled from age, the veins not blue or protruding like her father’s or her
second husband’s. She lifted her eyes to meet his gaze and was met with the
brown-eyed stare of a young woman.

The woman slid her too-smooth hand into her jacket. “I’m
going home.” The dashboard light glinted off the edge of a knife blade. ”You’re
going to hell.” The knife sliced into Janis’s belly. Her screams filled the
car. Blood spattered the steering wheel. She grabbed at her stomach with both
hands.

Her best suit. Ruined.

“No more children to murder.” The woman sneered at her and
jumped from the car. In the rear view mirror, Janis watched her run down the
road, her cane in one hand, the bloody knife in the other.

Janis reached for the mirror and fumbled for the blue
button. Blood smeared the glass.

“This is OnStar. How can we be of assistance, Mrs. Jones?”

“Help.” It was all she could manage.

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that? Is it raining in
Grantham?”

 Janis mustered every ounce of waning strength she had.
“Help.”

“Mrs. Jones, do you need us to call nine-one-one?”

“Yes.”

“OK, got it. Police are on their way.”

“Stabbed.”

“Did you say stabbed?” The operator’s voice became muffled
as if she were holding her hand over the microphone. Janis couldn’t make out
her words. “Mrs. Jones?” The operator’s voice came back full volume.
“Paramedics are on the way to your location. Just sit tight and stay on with
me.”

Janis stared at sheets of water on her windshield and tried
to time her gasping breath to the beat of the wipers. The pain in her abdomen
shot to every corner of her body. Blood drained from the wound, stained her
manicured fingers, pooled onto the leather and trickled onto the floor mat.

“Why?” Her voice was only a croak.

“Just hold tight, Mrs. Jones. They’re about three minutes
out.”

The woman’s cruel words came back.
No more children to
murder
. But she was innocent. The court said so.

Every blink of Janis’s eyes took longer to complete. Her
foot shifted off the brake pedal and the car inched forward. She put her bloody
knuckles against the gearshift and pushed it up, but only got it as far as
neutral. In the distance, the plaintive mewl of sirens squealed through the
pounding rain.

Her eyelids fluttered and she struggled to keep them open. A
wave of ice swept over her body. The car shook with the thump of rain and the
quaking of her limbs. Red and blue lights bounced off the water on the
windshield, distorted and twisted like a Salvador Dali painting. She raised one
hand and pawed at the air, tried to touch the pretty lights.

“Ma’am?”

Janis moved her lips but no answer would come. She was
drowning in ice. Through the Vaseline-haze that covered her eyes, a face popped
up. The face yelled and someone stabbed her arm. Her body was jostled and
jerked. The headlights of her Escalade bounced away. Rain pelted her face. A
door slammed and bright lights blinded her. She closed her eyes. The beeping
surrounding her became one long tone.

BILLIE SHIVERED, HER CLOTHING
soaked through. She sat in a culvert in two feet of runoff, like some filthy
baptism gone wrong. She looked skyward, shielding her eyes from the icy
raindrops that pummeled her quaking body.

Where was she?

She scrambled to her feet, the water squelching up between
the toes of her left foot. Grandfather’s cane fell from her lap and plopped
into the water. She snatched it before the current pulled it away. She tapped
the tip of the cane against her prosthesis. Why did she have the cane if she
was fully footed?

Her clothes weighed a thousand pounds. She rubbed her gloved
left hand, fisted around the cane, over the mound of soaking fleece at her
belly, and closed her eyes. Her father’s hoodie. She searched her memory for
the moment she’d donned his clothes, still stinking of chlorine since she hadn’t
had the heart to wash the imagined entrails of his scent from them.

Her eyelids flickered and she glanced down at her other
hand. Her hammering heart picked up its pace at the site of a wooden handle and
thin, curved, steel blade. Pain seeped into her consciousness. She dropped the
knife into the rushing water, tucked the cane under her armpit, peeled off the
wet glove, and raised her hand to her face. Blood oozed from a slice on her
thumb.

Her breath came fast. Her head whipped side to side trying
to find some landmark, anything recognizable to ground her. To bring her into
reality. Because there was no way this wasn’t a dream.

She scrabbled up the embankment to the roadside. A truck
roared by, honked its air horn. Its massive tires hit a pool of rain. A wave of
dirty water slammed into her and knocked her to the ground.

In the distance, sirens wailed.

Oh, God, what had she done? The knife. The cut. The clothes.
Sirens. She covered her ears and shut her eyes and rocked on the shoulder of
the road, gravel digging into her skin through the black cargo pants.

Another wave of puddle hit her, another honking horn. She
wiped muck from her cheeks and ran one hand through her sopping hair.

Sirens neared. Through the haze of rain and the fog of
memories, Billie watched flashing red lights close in. Her belly hollowed.

They were coming for her.

She scurried off the shoulder and rolled down the embankment
into the culvert. She lay in the water, only her head, from the nose up,
visible. An ambulance screeched past, followed in quick succession by two
police cars.

Her discarded glove bobbed on the surface of the water,
snagged on a branch. Billie grabbed it and inched up into a crouch. She scanned
the silent road. She stuffed the glove into the pouch of the hoodie, then
parted the waters with both hands, her eyes trained for the glint of steel. But
the runoff was too deep, the water too muddy. And too cold. She dragged her
good foot across the sludge at the bottom. When her shoe caught on anything,
she fished it out and held it up. Discarded bottles, a dead rat. A few feet down
current, she slammed her foot into something big enough to be a body and nearly
toppled over. She plunged both hands into the murk, grabbed the object, and
grunted against the weight. The remains of a blown tire surfaced. She abandoned
the search for the blade after three more cars sped by.

Maybe she’d imagined it. Maybe there had never been a knife.
But the cut on her thumb was all too real. As was the fact that she was wearing
her father’s clothes and was up to her thighs in runoff in the pouring rain
somewhere far from home.

The sound of tires speeding toward her on the wet pavement
was like the surf crashing against a sandy shore at night. Billie dove into the
bog. A wave reared up and splashed her face. She spit and coughed dirt and silt
and dead rat essence from her mouth. When only the sound of rainfall remained,
Billie climbed up the other side of the gutter, shoved branches aside with the
cane, and pushed her way through the brush.

Thirty yards of scratching twigs and poking limbs later, she
emerged into an open field. On the other side, across the blacktop of a
two-lane highway, a dying neon sign pulsated in the gloom of a late afternoon
downpour and announced “GAS for LESS.” She didn’t give a dead rat’s behind
about gas. But maybe they had a phone.

A bell over the door clanged and announced her presence to
the world inside the tiny station. A tiny diner shared the space, two booths
and four stools at the lunch counter. All empty, thank God for small mercies.

“You’re drenched!” A woman in a too-pink and too-stained
polyester tunic came from around the cash desk, a roll of paper towels in one
hand. She stripped of several squares of absorbent paper and handed them to
Billie. “Didn’t your mama teach you to come in out of the rain?”

Billie dried her face and squeezed her hair through the
towel. Cinnamon and vanilla and grease filled her nose. “My car broke down. Can
I borrow your phone?”

“Sure thing, honey. It’s on the wall around the corner. How
‘bout I get you a cup of coffee to warm up?”

Billie patted her pockets. “Thanks. But I left my purse in
the car.”

“On the house. Maybe a nice piece of pie too.”

Billie’s stomach roared in approval. “Bless you. That would
be wonderful.”

She found the telephone, its buttons sticky with strangers’
fingerprints. Billie reached for the handset but froze. Fingerprints. She
couldn’t leave any fingerprints. She glanced toward the door. How would she
wipe the handle down without looking suspicious? Or more suspicious.

She pulled the sleeve of her hoodie down and picked up the
receiver, balanced it between her cheek and shoulder, and pressed the buttons
with her finger poking the hoodie sleeve.

The phone rang two, three, four times. Damn it, please don’t
go to voice mail. She needed to hear his voice. Needed to know this wasn’t a
dream. Or better yet, discover that it was.

“Montoya.”

She gripped the phone in both hands. “Bruce?” She could
barely muster a whisper.

“Billie? Is that you? Where are you calling from?”

“Some diner in a gas station. I — I think I’ve done
something terrible. Can you come?”

“Yes. Give me an address.”

She looked around. A stack of menus sat on a table. She
stretched the cord and snatched one with her hoodie-covered hand. “Gloria’s
Diner, Highway Seventeen and a Hundred and Ninety-Eighth Street.”

“I’ll Google it. Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Shit, Billie, you’re damn near all the way to Ivy Valley.
That’s thirty clicks south of town. How did you get there?”

Billie swallowed. Salty tears combined with the remains of
muck on her face and dripped onto her lip. “I have no idea.”

Billie stood on the cool tile of her bathroom floor, one
hand on Bruce’s shoulder for balance.

He peeled her clothing from her limbs. The soaking wet
fabric had transformed to a sort of frozen glue. Even the oversized cargos
stuck to her skin and caught on the drenched stockings of her prosthesis. He
cranked the faucet to hot, and steam soon billowed from the bathtub.

Bruce laid a towel over the toilet seat lid and had Billie
sit. He dismantled her leg, stripped her of the filthy, stinking, sopping
trappings of her misadventure, lifted her, and set her in the warm water.

Her red, icy skin was lit on fire by the first touch of hot
bathwater. Billie winced, but sank into it; inhaled the lavender bath salts
Bruce had scooped under the stream of soothing heat pouring from the tap. It
cleansed the runoff from her body and calmed the frenetic pace of her mind.

On the drive home she’d told him how she awoke in the
culvert. About the gloves and the clothes and the knife, the sirens and
ambulance and police.

“That could be for anything. Car accident. Heart attack.
Shooting.”

His deep timbre soothed her soul, but did nothing to ease
the possibility that a monster lurked within her, waiting to take over her
conscious mind on a whim.

Bruce sat on the edge of the tub, dipped a sponge in the
scented water and ran it over her shoulders and arms. “So,” he cleared his
throat. “This ever happen before?”

Billie nodded. “A couple of months ago. I found myself on
the fire escape in the wee hours of the morning.”

“What were you doing out there?”

“No clue. It looked like I was going to jump. I had climbed
onto the railing. Woke up there.” She wiped sweat from her brow with trembling
fingers. “What if I hadn’t come to?”

“Don’t even think about it.” He kissed the top of her grimy
head. “You did. And you didn’t jump. So it must have been something other than
a suicide attempt.” He reached for the shampoo bottle and squeezed a blob into
his palm.

Billie inhaled the citrusy scent and closed her eyes,
mesmerized by the gentle massaging of his strong fingers against her scalp. “It
wasn’t the first time.” Or the last. But she didn’t want to share the impromptu
panhandling episode.

The massaging stopped. “What do you mean?”

Billie held her breath and disappeared under the water. She
rubbed the suds from her head and surfaced, wiping both hands over her face. “I
mean, I’ve done it before. Woke up somewhere unfamiliar, completely confused
and unaware of my surroundings. But it hadn’t happened for a long time. Not
since after Grandmother died.”

Bruce slid off the tub’s edge and sat on the floor. He took
her hand, enlaced his fingers with hers. “Holy shit. You sleepwalk?”

She laid her head on his arm. “Not exactly. Dissociative
fugue. Like sleepwalking. But more rare, and much worse.”

“Worse how?”

“Sometimes I go a long way. Sometimes I’m gone for hours.
Sometimes I lose an entire day.” She glanced at him.

“Like when you missed the movie? Was that this fugue thing?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. If it was I didn’t wake up in the
middle of it. So I can’t know.”

He rested his cheek against her head. “I see.” He reached
for a towel, stood, and pulled the plug. “Come on. I’ll make you tea.”

She took his offered hand, climbed from the tub, and
balanced on her leg. “I’d rather have a drink.”

“Then let’s see if you have any wine.” He wrapped the towel
around her, wiped her face dry with one corner, and rubbed his hands up and
down her back.

An odd memory crept in, of her mother after bath time when
Billie was little, maybe four or five. The big towel, sitting on her mother’s
lap. The good times before she reeked of booze and before Billie knew that the
other smell was cigarette smoke. Billie would lay her head against her mother’s
shoulder and her mother would rock her and hum a lullaby.

Billie leaned into Bruce’s body and rested her head on his
shoulder. He engulfed her with his arms. “It’s all right, Billie Sunshine,” he
whispered into her wet hair. “I’ve got you.”

Billie held the teacup in both hands, the heat easing the
remaining chill from her bones. In retrospect, she was happy to be out of wine.
Chamomile was working its magic, warming her from the inside out, letting her
shed most of the panic. But not all of it. Nothing was that magical.

Bruce breezed about her tiny kitchen, setting about to fry
and boil some of her meagre refrigerator offerings into something edible. He
manoeuvred the cupboards and countertops with such ease. He reached to pull a
knife from the dusty block that Billie’s grandmother had given her when she
moved out on her own.

Billie froze. Her gaze focused in on an empty slot in the
wood. A missing knife. Her gut turned to stone and she fumbled the teacup. It
crashed to the floor and sent shards of kiln-fired pottery scattering about.

Bruce swung around, a chef’s knife in his hand.

The room spun and Billie’s vision blurred. She wavered on
the stool and tipped to the side.

Bruce raced around the breakfast counter and grabbed her
before she hit the ground. He carried her to the sofa, laid her down, and
tapped at her cheeks. “Billie, are you all right? Did you faint?”