Young Squatters (13 page)

It was simply another gift that Bradford had given her.

Until now. These three bitches had come marching up the driveway like they were on a mission.  Harper felt fear slice through her, even though she knew they wouldn’t dare do anything to her in her own yard.  Typical of them, though, to wait until Bradford wasn’t home.

Cowards.
That’s what Bradford would have called them.

Harper squinted at them.  They were standing with the morning sun behind them, glaring into her eyes.  “It’s not our fault.  We had an agreement—”

“We all know you’re lying, you little slut,” another woman butted in.  The one with the blonde ringlets nodded at her, as if encouraging this mockery.

“Why don’t you and that little shit boyfriend of yours just learn when you’re not wanted?” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Okay, can you get off my property, please?” she asked, her voice shaking a little. 

“It’s not your property,” the blonde said to her, backed by her two compatriots in their brand name clothing and perfectly-permed hair.

Harper wondered if they had rehearsed this, before coming over to torment her for no reason.

“Make us, you little bitch.”

She was more than a little scared now.  What if they tried something?  What if they got one of their husbands or sons to try something?  She was alone here today, and Bradford was at class and wouldn’t be home until later, much later, probably not until dark.  It had been more than a month since the Donnellys had moved out, but no one in the neighborhood wanted anything to do with them, and now they were resorting to physical violence?  They had crept closer, making her drop her spade.  She thought later that had been a stupid move; she could have used the spade as a weapon, if she needed to defend herself.

“Look, I’ll call the police.”  She held up her phone for them to see.

Not one of the three of them looked impressed.

She scooted away from them as their shadows fell over her, driving out the sunlight on this beautiful day.

Some teenage boys had been standing at the end of the driveway shouting curses and insults the other night, probably that little slut Clara’s friends from high school.  They’d egged the house, and someone had thrown a rock through a window.  Bradford had cursed them out and ran them off, and she’d been comforted to know that he could defend their home.  She’d still been scared half to death.  What if they tried something like that when she was home alone, like now?  So she’d put nine-one-one on speed-dial.

“Go ahead.  We’re not afraid of you, bitch,” the blonde said, a smile playing on her very red lips.  “The police know what you’re up to by now, you whore.  They’re not going to arrest us.  Why don’t you and your boyfriend just pack up and get out of here?  You sure as hell better run, bitch, because this neighborhood doesn’t take kindly to liars, especially young girls like you, who lie about their age.”

Harper got up on her feet, and they kept calling her names and hurling the vilest insults at her, following her as she dialed the police and retreated into the house.  They tried to push the door open and follow her in.

“Stop it!  Let go!  I’m calling the police!  The police are coming!” she yelled, tears growing in her eyes.

She had never realized that people, even the people who were supposed to be the most refined citizens, could be so cruel.

“Hello, nine-one-one dispatcher, what’s your emergency?”

Harper put the phone on speaker as she shoved at the door.  “You hear that?  The police are coming!  Help me!  I’m being attacked!”  Pangs of sharp pain filled her chest, and it felt like someone had tightened a noose around her throat, pulling it tight.  “Oh my God! Help me!  Help me!”

SLAM!

The women stopped pushing back against the door and Harper’s weight fell against it as it crashed abruptly shut.

“Stupid girl, open this door.  Admit to your wrong doings!” one of the women cried to her, the words ringing in her panicking ears.

Behind the door, she could still hear the women shouting epithets at her and beating at the door.

“Ma’am? Ma’am, what was that noise?  Are you alright, ma’am?  I have your address here, I’m sending a squad car out to you.  Ma’am, are you alright?  Do you need medical assistance?  Please speak to me, ma’am.”

Harper slid to the ground, sobbing uncontrollably, her back up against the door.  Every time the women banged on it her head hit the wood, over and over again.

“I think—!  I think—!  Oh God, my chest!  I can’t—!  Breathe—!  I can’t breathe—!”  A chilling thought entered her mind. 
Oh my God!  Heart attack!  I’m having a heart attack!

Suddenly, everything went quiet.

***

“Easy, babe. There you go.”  Bradford helped her into their bed.  They’d moved into the master bedroom shortly after the Donnellys had been forced to move out, Bradford having found a way to get past the locked door.

Harper felt dizzy and sick to her stomach.  The doctor at the emergency room had given her something called clonazepam to help her settle down.  As it turned out, she hadn’t had a heart attack.  She’d had a panic attack.  But she’d spent most of the day in the hospital waiting for Bradford to come pick her up after the tests for everything else came back negative.  Now it was almost five o’clock.

“I still don’t understand where you were all day.  I called you like a dozen times.”

He smoothed her hair back from her face, kissed her on the forehead, and pulled the blankets up over her.  “It’s okay, babe.  You know I had to go down to the unemployment office and take care of that paperwork today.”

She shook her head.  She felt very sleepy.  “No, I didn’t know that.  Why is your unemployment paperwork more important than me being in the hospital?  Why can’t you just get a job like a normal person?” she cried, tired, broken.  He’d been gone so much he had no clue what she had had to deal with in this neighborhood.  This latest incident had simply been the last--and worst--of many events.

“Come on, babe, don’t be like that.  You know jobs are for suckers,” Bradford said, tucking her in.  She frowned at him as he continued. “My dad hasn’t had a job in like ten years and he just bought a new Lexus.  There’s plenty of money out there if you just know where to look.  You just gotta make the most of the opportunities, right?  That’s what I was doing, making the most of an opportunity.”

“But I was having a
heart attack
,” she said, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.  She had never liked hospitals, not ever, and today she had been in one all by herself for hours.  He didn’t have any idea how that made her feel.

“You weren’t having a heart attack, baby.  Just a panic attack. You’re going to be fine, you just need to get some rest.”

Harper shook her head, but the room swam around her.  “You don’t know what those bitches said to me.  I was so scared, Bradford.  And what if it was those boys again, the ones who threw the rock through the window?  What if I had been here all by myself that time?  What if they had done something to me?”

A couple of loose tears floated down her cheek, mingling with her dirty hair.  She felt too tired to wipe them away.

“I know, baby, I know.  I’m sorry.  I’m here now.  Everything’s gonna be alright.”  He sat at the edge of the bed and stroked her hair.  She couldn’t see his expression, as everything was turning blurry.

“When’s this all gonna be over?” she mumbled.  Her eyelids felt so… heavy…

“Soon, baby.  They can’t keep it up forever.  We just gotta hang tough.  All this’ll blow over, I promise.”  He kissed her gently on the head.

“I just want it to be over, Bradford.”  She looked up at him with wet eyes.  “Maybe I should call my mom?”

“No, baby, don’t talk like that.  I’ll take care of you.  Didn’t I tell you I’d take care of you?  No, shhh, be quiet now, get some rest.”  He put his finger to her lips as she tried to protest again.  Her eyes closed.  Before long, she was sleeping.

Bradford shook her a few times.  When he was sure she was well and truly sleeping, he turned out the light and closed the door to the room behind him.  He dialed a number on his phone.

“Hey, brother! How you doing?  What?  No, everything’s fine, just a little problem with the woman, you know?  Nothing I can’t handle,” he said, chuckling as he walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him softly.  Poor Harper. She wasn’t used to the life he was, where danger lurked around every corner.  She really didn’t have the heart for it.  That was no matter; he liked her for that very reason.  She still trusted him, and that was good.  They could still have their perfect home.

“Hey, you still wanna have that party tonight?  Yeah, these pussy little bitches around here want to scare us?  We’ll show them we don’t scare that easy.  Yeah, bring everyone, the whole frat house, everybody.  Alright, brother, later.”

Nick sat in the front seat of his Land Rover, looking at what used to be his own house.  They’d bought it ten years ago, during the real estate crash.  The previous owners had gone underwater on the mortgage and Nick and Nora had been able to get it for a steal.  Colin and Clara were still so young, full of life and curiosity.  The years of hard work that Nick had put into building his self-publishing business had finally paid off with a string of best-sellers, and they’d sold the house where they’d raised the kids for a little more than it was worth in that shitty recession.  This had been Nora’s dream house, in Nora’s dream neighborhood.

They’d been happy in that house.

“Now look at it,” he groused to himself, taking another swig on the fifth of Jack in his hands.

All up and down the street, there were cars parked up against the curbs.  People were coming and going over the lawn, young people, little shit punks and bitches like Bradford and Harper.  Walking on his lawn, walking over the flowers in his garden with their red Solo cups. Strobe lights flashed against the first floor windows, and music was thumping over the neighborhood like a dog on a man’s leg.  Some college girl was blowing a guy in a Chevy right in front of his house.  Slut. Like that Harper bitch.

Pregnant his ass.  She wasn’t pregnant.  Hadn’t developed even as much as a bump in the five months since they’d moved in. He took another drink.

“Nora,” he mumbled incoherently, shaking his head, trying to clear his vision.  He set the bottle down, leaning it on his flat stomach.  He almost laughed every time he thought about that big old belly he had developed when he had lived in a proper home.  Nothing like extreme stress and not eating anything to cure obesity.

His lawn looked like crap.  Someone had mowed it.  Probably that little punk ass kid, but he’d done a shit job of it.  Couldn’t even afford to keep up with the landscapers’ bills, Nick would have bet on it.  Punk ass unemployed little shit.  Taking his home away from him. And not one damn person had done a thing about it.

Now Nora was talking divorce, seriously this time.  She’d had it with him, with his ineffectiveness, citing the fact that he couldn’t “hold his own” as the reason for her dissatisfaction with him.  The real reason was probably that she liked being single, having Ben wrapped around her finger like a puppy.  Ben probably thought she was a saint, compared to her sister.

In truth, they were exactly the same person, only Nora was more secretive about her pushy nature.

“Divorce me,” he muttered, unscrewing the lid to take another gulp.  “Stupid bitch. We’ll see how far she gets without me.”

His phone rang.  He still had a phone, even though he’d dropped it a few days ago and the screen had virtually shattered.

“What?” he slurred into the microphone, swaying a little in his seat.  The Jack was doing its job; he began to lose feeling in his feet.

“Nick,” a familiar voice filled his ears.  “Nick, where are you?  You sound drunk.  What’s going on?”

He smiled a little.  Sarah still looked after him, after all this time.  She had let him stay with her, in her one-room studio apartment.  It was so different from what he had experienced, but she had done her best to make him feel at home, to feel wanted and appreciated.

He’d slept with her, too, but he tried not to think about that.  His wedding band still sat, untouched, on his left ring finger.  He didn’t love Sarah, not in the least, but she had been willing and he had been drunk, and of course they’d always known each other at a deeper level than they had let on.  It had happened a couple of times.  He knew Sarah thought he cared about her like he cared about Nora, but Nick wasn’t sure he could ever be unattached from his wife, his teammate, even if she hated his guts.

“Don’t worry,” Nick told Sarah over the phone.  “Everything is going to be a-okay, sweet cheeks.”

“You are drunk.  Are you driving?” she asked, her voice worried.

“Nah, just hanging out with my friends,” Nick said, scoffing as a few more kids made their way toward his house, where the music blared and the alcohol probably flowed freely.  Yee haw.

“Nick, come home right now.”

I am home
, Nick thought, but to Sarah he just mumbled something that even he couldn’t understand.

“What did you say?”

“I’ll be back in a few hours,” he told her, hanging up before she could protest again, like she was wont to do.

***

Colin was out on bail.  That much at least was good news.  Nora’s sister—or maybe it had been Ben, that was a more likely choice—had put up the money, and no one blamed Colin, of course.  Just standing up for the family, like Nick himself should have done.  And he should have done it a long time ago. Nora never missed a chance to remind him of that; hell no.  The few times they had spoken on the phone, she had been sure to emasculate him and call him a coward, a fucking coward, even after giving her everything she had always wanted.

“Neva shoulda listened ta fuckin’ lawyers,” he muttered.  He took another swig from the fifth, felt it burn all the way down, winced and wiped his sloppy mouth with the back of his sleeve.  He threw the bottle and the remainder of its contents to the other side of his car, into a pile of water bottles, beer bottles and chips bag.  Lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, more lawyers.  Lawyers for his defense, lawyers for his offense, lawyers for his restraining order.  “Fuckin’ lawyers.”

Derek and his partners had practically bled him dry.  After all the work he’d given that firm over the years, this was what they did to him.  Couldn’t even get two punk kids out of his house. He should’ve done it himself, a long time ago.  Should’ve taken care of his family. Protected his family.  “Serve and protect?  Bullshit.  Cops’re in it with the lawyers.”

Nora wouldn’t let him stay with her, and Clara, and Colin.  It had been weeks since he had seen either of his kids, even though they hadn’t gone through a custody battle yet.  He wondered if Clara had won the spelling bee she had been preparing for.  He wondered if Colin had done anything else to find a hole in Bradford’s plan.  He wanted to speak with his kids, wanted to spend some time with them, but Nora, and Ben, of course, who agreed with everything she said, refused.

He’d been drinking too much, they said.  Drinking and getting belligerent.  That was the word Nora used,
belligerent
.  Bitch.  He’d never liked her family, or Ben, come to think about it.  Drinking too much?  He was Irish.  As if Ben hadn’t ever drank too much. He’d probably been spilling all of Nick’s secrets to Nora, day after day.  “Show ‘em how much an Irishman can drink.”

He started humming the Notre Dame fight song to himself, then started slurring it aloud:

“…Send a volley cheer on high!  Shake down the thunder from the sky!  What though the odds be great or small, Old Notre Dame will win over all...”

***

Harper scrunched her face.  Lots of noise. Where was she, a club?  She squinted her eyes open.  Dark. Nighttime. In her old house; in her mom and dad’s old house. Dad was home and he and Mom were having one of their parties downstairs, one of those fancy get-togethers to which she was never allowed to come down.

No, that’s not right.  That was a long time ago. 
She rubbed at her forehead.  This wasn’t her old house.  It was her new house.  Their new house. Hers and Bradford’s. Dad was long gone.

She squeezed her eyes closed and opened them again.  There was a thumping, a steady bass beat from a sound system.  It seemed to her like it was shaking the bed.  Where was Bradford?  Were the neighbors having a party?

The neighbors? They didn’t like Harper and Bradford.  Mean old bitches had scared the shit out of her.  Was that just this morning?  How long had she been sleeping?  Had it been days, weeks?  Had she gone into a coma from that weird medication the doctors had given her?  She remembered Bradford putting her to bed, but not much else.

She heard a cheer resound through the house.  Was that from downstairs?

She gently kicked the blankets off and swung her feet out of the bed.  Her head was still spinning from the drugs. They’d given her drugs at the hospital; she remembered now.  Cloza-something. Supposedly to calm her down. She rubbed at her head gently and got up, clutching at the cheap night table beside the bed.  She wobbled a few steps across the room.  Her right hand on the wall helped keep her steady.  It seemed like the floor was moving, that she moved through Jello.

She opened the door and bright light lanced through, burning the backs of her eyes.  She squinted and stumbled a bit.  Her shoulder bumped heavily against the doorframe.  The music, the noise, the shouting, it was all coming from downstairs.  She squinted down the bright hallway.

Where the hell was Bradford?

She stumbled a few steps.  A handful of people came out of the second upstairs bathroom in front of her, laughing and carrying plastic party cups.  A cloud of smoke followed them out.  It smelled like pot.  They were smoking pot in her house?  Who were they?  They laughed at the sight of her, as if she was some kind of clown, then ran away down the stairs.

She took a look in the bathroom when she got to it.  Someone had taken her cosmetics mirror and put it on the back of the toilet.  There was white powder traced across it.  And it smelled like someone, or more than one someone, had thrown up.  She gagged a little and tasted bile in the back of her own throat.  Where the hell was Bradford?  She was getting scared now.  Who were these people?

***

Flashing, strobe light.  Thump-thump.  Music.

Nick weaved through what had once been his dining room.  Someone bumped into him and he crashed against the wall.  “Fucker!” No one could have heard him over the music.  He pushed off the wall and staggered into the kitchen.  College-aged boys were doing shots.  There were a couple of girls going drink-for-drink with them.  He squinted and blinked through the sliding-glass back door.  Was someone head-standing on a beer keg on his back deck, the deck made from that rare wood Nora had insisted on buying, even though it had cost him an arm and a leg?

He shook his head.  Bastards. All these bastards in his house. He pushed someone out of his way and staggered through the kitchen to the family room.  His family room. He used to have his sixty-inch flat screen on that wall, over the fireplace.  His modular leather couch was right there.  He waved absently to a space where teenagers were bumping and grinding on a makeshift dance floor.  His easy chair was over there, in the corner where Bradford was standing now, behind a d-jay set-up, with another rough-looking character.

They were bent over something, on a little table.  Counting something. Nick drew closer, but not too close; he didn’t want Bradford to know he was here.

Drugs. He knew the white powdery substance, having been exposed to it time and time again in college during his more wild years.  Bradford Whitney was selling drugs in his house.  Fury raced through Nick like a tornado.  The home where he had brought up two beautiful children with whom he had thought was his perfect wife, was being defiled by this son of a bitch, this punk, this unemployed welfare rat.

He’d had it.  He’d had it the second this boy and his friend had set foot in his house, and he’d had it now.  The alcohol made him bold, making his thoughts race at incalculable speeds as memories and new ideas flashed through his brain.

He walked away from the scene, stumbling into some kids who were standing, smoking, and chatting in his hallway.  The picture frames that had been on the walls had all been taken down, probably destroyed. That made him sad.  He could remember Nora putting those up when they had first moved in, so hopeful that the house would turn into something that she could really love, something that she could mold and create by herself.  She had done just that, only to see her creation destroyed by no-good punks.

“Watch it, old man!” one of the kids said.

Nick swung at the kid’s face, planning to rearrange that smirk and fat mouth.  He missed.  His hand hit the wall, breaking through the plaster.  He couldn’t even feel any of the pain as he pulled his hand back, watching the kids gaping at him.  He stumbled away from them, swearing.  Fuck them.  Fuck them all.  Fuck their families, who were probably no better than them.  Fuck the world.

He found his office door.  It was still in the same place, thank God.  He fumbled in his pockets, searching for the master key, accidentally pressing up against the door.  The door swung open without prompting; Bradford must have found a way to unlock it.  As he walked into the darkness, only a few kids stood in the corners of the room, making out or passed out from all the drugs and drinks.  His desk still stood, covered in a sticky substance that he didn’t recognize.  He made a face of disgust, searching through its drawers and the papers inside of them, searching for something specific.

When he found it, all hell would break loose.

“Nora,” he said, using her name as a war cry.  He said it softly at first, slowly.  Then his voice gained volume and depth.  “Nora,” he said again drawing the attention of some of the kids in the room.  “Nora,” he repeated, hand grasping the cold object, warming it with his sweaty hand.

“Nora!” he screamed.