Something Fierce (31 page)

“I took it off during art class so I wouldn’t get clay all over it. I forgot to put it back on.”

“You don’t have an art class. You’re lying.”

“I am not lying. I added the class late.” She reached into her purse to produce the ring when she noticed that Seth’s vehicle was gone. “Oh, no.”

“What? You lost it?”

She started the engine. “I have to go. You have to get out.”

“What?”

She looked in every direction. There was no sign of Seth anywhere. “Get out!”

“I want…I want my ring back.”

“I don’t have time for this now. GET OUT!”

“Not without the ring.”

She smacked his face. “You don’t tell me!” she shouted and started pounding on his chest. “Get out of my car!”

“Stop it!” He grabbed onto the collar of her jacket and slammed her against the door, bouncing her head off of the window. He was stronger than she’d ever imagined and never had he attacked her like this. It terrified her. His face was contorted, his lip and eye twitching madly, as he banged her head on the window a second and a third time. He was crying and screaming, “You can’t keep doing this to me. I can’t take it. I can’t. I can’t!”

Kerri managed to find the door handle. The door swung open and they fell, hanging halfway out of the car with Kyle on top of her. She screamed. “Help me! Somebody please help me!” She screamed again and saw a young guy drop his backpack and start running toward them.

Kyle was instantly off of her and trying to open the passenger door when Kerri sprang up and slammed the car into drive. It lurched forward and Kyle was thrown out as Kerri sped toward the nearest exit, head hurting, heart racing. She had to catch him.

Every minute he was away from her was one minute closer to losing him forever.

S
eth was sitting at
a red light
on Mentor Avenue with a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. He could hear the blood gushing through his brain. All that didn’t make sense over the past few months—things misplaced, lost, out of order; the rollercoaster of emotion, the agonizing sense that something was dreadfully wrong—added up now to a terrible and unthinkable truth. So outrageous it was, so cruel and malicious that it was all he could do—

The rude, piercing blast of a car horn shot through him. The light had turned green. “Alright!” he shouted, his heart thumping madly, looking in the rearview mirror at the ugly, irritated face in the car behind him. Even after Seth started to move, the guy kept at it, laying on his horn, his face full of indignation, his mouth moving rapidly, his middle finger idiotically pumping at the air like he’d been waiting all day to attack someone for some minor infraction.

Seth slammed on the brakes and the car screeched and squealed to a halt behind him. He was getting out of the vehicle to confront this bastard, show him there were consequences to laying on that horn, and waving that middle finger around, when he caught himself. This would be more madness. He didn’t need any more madness. Everything he knew and believed and stood for was falling to pieces around him; he couldn’t seem to stop that, but by God, he could refuse more madness. He could stay inside of himself and renounce more madness. He put the SUV in gear and moved forward. He took the first exit he came to off the main drag.

He took nameless roads, made random turns. He didn’t know where he was going except away, somewhere away from cars, and horns, and people, somewhere he could center himself. The strip malls and neighborhoods disappeared and were replaced by fields and forests. This was the right direction. This would work. He drove into the lot of a state park and shut the vehicle down. He laid his head back and gazed out the sunroof. Dark clouds gathered overhead; the wind picked up.

His phone began to vibrate and his anger spiked again like hot bile in the back of his throat. Before he could think, he was answering her call.

“Seth! Thank God!” It wasn’t Kerri. It was Gail. “He answered!” she said to someone in the background, then to him again. “Are you okay?”

Okay? Not exactly. “Yeah. Why?”

“Put him on speaker.” It was Tina’s voice in the background. “Where are you? Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”

Before he could answer either question, Gail said, “We’ve been worried sick. We’ve called you a least twenty times since yesterday.”

“Why? Why would you do that?”

“You called me Sunday morning. Very early Sunday morning.”

He’d been in the hotel very early Sunday morning. In the midst of a sleep-a-thon that lasted somewhere around thirty hours. “No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, Seth, you did,” Gail said. “You called me at ten after four Sunday morning. You sounded drunk. Really, really drunk. Or…worse.”

“You don’t remember?” Tina asked.

“No.” He rubbed a hand over his bruised face and a volt of pain shot through him. He tried to concentrate. “What did I say?”

“You said you were in trouble. Something about the police and a fight. You said Kerri was messing you up, that she was inside your head.” Gail was frustrated. “I kept asking you where you were and what was going on but you were so out of it that I couldn’t understand what you were saying. Then the phone went dead and you didn’t answer when I called back.”

“She called me then,” Tina said. “We kept trying to reach you but there was no answer. We were worried. This is so out of character. So completely unlike you. We didn’t know what to do so we drove to Ohio.”

“You’re here!?”

“Yes. Since yesterday. Your place was empty. We waited and waited. We tried the school. All they could do was take a message. We were about to call the police when you answered.”

“Shit.” He had avoided the faculty area altogether and forgotten that he was supposed meet Robin after his Creative Writing class. “I didn’t get the message. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

“We’ve been worried for months, Seth. You’re not yourself. You haven’t visited since Rita’s funeral.”

“Even on the phone,” Gail said, “it’s like you’re half there. All you talk about is Kerri and it’s usually some bullshit that I can’t imagine you putting up with.”

“Some of the things you’ve said about this girl,” Tina said. “Why are you with her?”

He tried to remember one of those phone conversations but his memories ran together like the colors of a freshly painted canvas left out in the rain. “I’m not. But I wasn’t sure then. About Kerri. About anything. I still wouldn’t know if it wasn’t for that fucking freak at that bar—”

“What?”

“Levi. As soon as he answered to Levi, I knew the website had been real and Kerri was lying and the doctors were full of shit and I
was right!
And if I was right about the website, I was right about…other stuff. But it seemed so unbelievable at the time. I was so…”

“What doctors? What website?” Gail asked. “What are you talking about?”

“That doesn’t matter right now,” Tina said. “Where are you?”

He wasn’t sure. He looked around. “I’m at a park. Maybe ten or fifteen miles from the house.”

“When did you last talk to Kerri?”

“I don’t know. It’s been days.”

“Is that because you two are fighting?”

“I think it started with a fight, yeah. She’s been blowing up my phone. That’s why I haven’t been answering it. Sorry.”

“Why didn’t she confront you at school?”

“I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t make sense. She’s not the type to be ignored.”

“What do you mean? You don’t even know her.”

“No, I don’t. But I know my brother and what I’ve pieced together over the past few months doesn’t bode well for either of you.”

“You sound terrible,” Gail said. “Come back to Cherry Run with us. Stay for a couple days. Get your bearings.”

“I can’t just leave,” he said, though he realized that was exactly what he needed to do. “I still have final classes and final papers to grade after that.”

“Someone could cover your last classes,” Gail said, “and you could grade the final papers back in Pennsylvania as easily as you could grade them here.”

He didn’t answer. The rain was coming down hard now. He tried to think but his thoughts were all over the place and he couldn’t seem to string them together. Going home made sense though, didn’t it? Being around his family was another step away from this madness, this mess. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “Maybe I could swing a day or two. I need to grab a few things at the house first.”

“We’re here,” Tina said. “We can get whatever you need.”

“How did you get in the house?”

“The back door was open.”

“It couldn’t have been.”

“It was. Tell us what you need and we’ll get it.”

“I can’t think right now. I’ll just come there.”

“If you’ve been ignoring Kerri,” Tina said, “she could show up here any minute.”

An image of wrapping his hands around Kerri’s pale neck flared across his mind.

“Tell us what you want us to bring,” Gail said.

He could imagine the bones in Kerri’s neck breaking in his hands. He slammed his palm into his forehead as if that would knock the images out. “Just some clothes,” he blurted, trying to force his mind elsewhere. “There’s a travel bag hanging in the bathroom next to the towels. Bring that too.” He tried to think of something else, anything other than choking Kerri to death. “The anthology and the creative writing books. They should both be on the kitchen table or next to the couch in the living room. If you happen to see my wallet lying around, grab it.” But they wouldn’t, he realized. Kerri, most likely, had his wallet. “My journal,” he heard himself say. “Bring my journal too.”

“Where is it? What’s it look like?”

He described it and told them where to find it when his phone beeped. “Shit. My battery is dying. Grab my phone charger too. It’s on top of the dresser in the bedroom, I think.”

“Do you have a car charger?”

“I used to.” He felt his blood pressure shoot up again. “I lost…it came up missing about a week ago.”

“Do you have enough time to give us directions to where you’re at?”

“I doubt it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tina said. “Just go straight to my place now. Mark will be at work by the time you get there, but you know where the spare key is. We’ll be right behind you. Just go straight there, okay?”

Before he could say anything, his phone went dead.

He sat there for a long while, his head pounding, he was watching the rain run down the windshield in tiny, crystal rivers, his mind replaying arguments with Kerri over the past months, fights, doomed evenings, all the insanity, the traps she set for him time and time again. The cuts on his face and the torn gums around the tooth that had been knocked loose were throbbing along with his head. True betrayal, he’d read somewhere, deeply wounded not just the heart, but the soul.

This was more than a betrayal. This was plain cruelty. This was unforgivable.

In a sort of daze, he started the engine and left the park. He realized that he was not heading in the direction of Pennsylvania, but going back to Dr. Jarrell’s house. Tina was right. Kerri was bound to show up there and he should avoid that probability. But it was as if some powerful, invisible force was pulling him to her, demanding to know the truth, determined to hold her accountable, make her pay.

Approaching the main highway, a deer darted out of a clump of pines and directly in the path of the SUV. Seth slammed on the brakes. The vehicle slid sideways, somehow missing the animal. Slammed back into the driver’s seat, he was once again fully present, aware of his breathing, the thumping of his heart, the beat of the rain, the windshield wipers flipping back and forth, the truck sitting stalled, in the middle of the road.

He started the engine and pulled off the highway.

You have to decide.

“Decide what?”

Is this the Book of Kerri…or is it the Book of Seth? It can’t be both. Not anymore. Your call, Professor.

He took a deep breath, then put the SUV in gear, turned it around and began heading for Cherry Run.

His sisters were shocked at his appearance. Gail immediately set to doctoring the cuts on his face and hands while Tina went to work on a pot of soup. They wanted to know everything. The obvious place to start was the fight that marked up his face. Once he got going, he couldn’t stop. Words flew out of him. The girls interjected questions as he talked, and scattered as he was, he answered them as fully as he could. He told about the website and going to the doctors. The blood pressure meds, the antidepressants, the sleeping pills.

Tina wanted to know the names of what he had been prescribed, but he couldn’t remember off-hand. He did recall, however, that due to the circumstances of the past several days, he hadn’t taken the blood pressure pills or antidepressants. This was fine with him. He wanted off of the damned things anyway. These were not the kind of drugs that should be stopped cold turkey, but since he already had a few days under his belt, he decided to do just that by not taking anymore. This, he kept to himself since he knew his sisters would both strongly advise against it and push him to get the opinion of yet another doctor he couldn’t afford.

As he recounted the unsettling events of the past few months, he fought hard to stay present. It was like he was talking about someone else. “There are a lot of details that I can’t even remember,” he said, “but I wrote them in my journal. Did you remember to bring it?”

“We couldn’t find it,” Gail said, putting peroxide on the raw, swollen knuckles of his right hand.

“Did you check under the blankets? Under the bed?”

“Yes,” Tina said. “We knew how important it would be to you so we checked the whole house. Every room.”

“We even looked between the couch cushions, any place it could have possibly been.”

Tina scraped diced onions from a cutting board into a frying pan with garlic and chopped carrots sizzling in oil. “It’s not there, Seth. I’m sorry.”

“She took it,” he muttered. Anger and the deep ache of betrayal swelled inside him again, crashing into each other and mixing with the horrible feeling of knowing that the most personal, private thing he owned was in someone else’s hands.