Scratch, page 5
“I’m a little airplane, yow, yow,” they sang together, followed by the one about the abominable snowman in the market and the one about the Martian Martians. Adam and Mike both laughed and giggled, and somewhere along the way he forgot all about being depressed for a while. It was the best day he had had in a long time.
Until they got home.
CHAPTER SIX
Adam knew something was wrong the moment they walked in the door. He didn’t see Holly right away, and the broken glass had been cleaned up. He didn’t notice the missing picture until after she told him about it later. But something wasn’t right. He filled with a sense of unease as soon as he put Michaela down. His back and shoulders stiffened. A chill did a Fred Astaire dance up the steps of his spine. His arms prickled with goose bumps and he felt boxed in by claustrophobic dread.
Adam would have laughed at the notion of psychic ability, but his powers of empathy and intuition were at least cousins to it. It accounted in large part to his success as a counselor. He had lost track of the times when a sudden insight would lead him directly to where his client needed to go. Adam chalked it up to being a good listener and to deductive reasoning. If he admitted the truth to himself his hunches bordered on the uncanny.
“Holly?” he called, fearing that silence would be the only answer. He relaxed a little when she appeared from the kitchen. Red, puffy eyes broadcast evidence of tears, but she was wearing her “not-in-front-of-Michaela-I’ll-tell-you-later,” look.
Are you okay? Adam asked silently with his face. She said Yes with hers. There was nothing psychic about the exchange, just the bond that exists between lovers.
“Mommy,” Mike said, “we have pizza.” The word “pizza” was drawn out into three or four syllables.
“I see that,” Holly said. “Let’s go wash your hands, then we’ll eat, okay?”
“’Kay.” Mike rushed up the steps. Holly stopped half way up and turned to Adam.
“I’m all right,” she said. “But something happened. Something serious.”
“I know.”
Holly nodded, not really surprised. She followed Mike to the bathroom. By the time they returned Adam had put paper plates and napkins on the living room coffee table. He cut a slice into small pieces for Mike, then picked off the pepperoni and put it on a separate plate for Buggly.
“Dinner,” he said in a bad Italian accent, “is served.” He swept a paper napkin out in front of him with a dramatic flair, then tucked it into the front of Mike’s shirt. She sat down and began to push the pizza around. Very little of it ended up in her mouth.
Holly picked at her own piece, too upset to eat. Adam devoured his own. He had lost twenty pounds over the winter. There had been many days when his depression had eaten his appetite. He was glad to have it back.
They tried to act normal for Michaela’s sake. She tended to pick up their moods and try them on. Like Mommy’s shoes, this mood was too big for her to wear comfortably. By the time she had her jammies on she was complaining that her tummy hurt.
“I think it was the pep-pe-ROw-ni,” she said, even though she knew she hadn’t eaten any.
“Do you want something to make your tummy feel better,” Holly asked while opening the medicine cabinet. Mike pursed her lips and shook her head in a definite “No.”
She lifted her arms to Adam to be picked up. He lifted her easily and braced her weight on his arm. Her head rested on his shoulder, a thumb in her mouth, Buggly dangling from the other hand. Holly followed as he carried her toward the bedroom. Adam flicked on the light, then placed Michaela on her bed. When he started to stand she grabbed his hand.
“Are you going to be okay, sweetie?” Adam asked.
“My tummy hurts,” she whined again. She took his hand and placed it over her bellybutton. “Right there.”
“What can I do to help?” Adam asked.
“Tell me a story.”
“From a book?”
“From your mouth.”
“Okay.” Adam smiled. That was Michaela’s way of asking him to make one up. He had been doing this for longer than she could remember. Usually the stories were about a little girl, who Michaela had insisted be named Mike, just like her, and her friend, Buggly the Bear, who had amazing adventures together. Adam used lots of classic fairy tale imagery, and at first Holly had been afraid that the stories might frighten her daughter, but Mike seemed to love them. In the end, the story-Mike would always be safe, knowing she would have Buggly to watch out for her. That comforted Michaela.
“Okay,” Adam said, then paused to think. It had been a while. He hadn’t had the energy for this very much over the winter, and usually deferred bedtime to Holly, or simply read to Mike when he was pressed into service.
“Where were they when we left them last?” he asked.
“In the woods,” Mike said. It didn’t help much… Mike and Buggly were always in the woods.
“Oh yes.” Adam was warming up to his task. He hadn’t realized how much he missed this. “I remember now.
“Mike and Buggly were walking…”
“Once upon a time,” Mike corrected, and placed her hand over Adam’s to keep it on her stomach.
“You’re right.” Adam winked at Holly. “I’m out of practice. Okay. Once upon a time a beautiful little girl named Mike and her bestest friend in the world Buggly, who just happened to be a giant plush bear, were walking in the woods. They were very hungry, because it was getting late.
“’Maybe we can find a pizza bush,’ said Buggly.
“’Silly’, said Mike. ‘There’s no such thing.’ Buggly shrugged. He was pretty sure there was such a thing, but he hadn’t seen one in a long time.
“The path they were on led them into a very dark part of the woods. The trees were all brown and twisted, and there were sharp rocks on the ground that hurt their feet. Mike and Buggly both started to feel a little scared.
“’Maybe we should get out of here,’ the bear said.
“’But I’m still hungry,’ Mike said. ‘Look, there’s some berries on that bush!’ Mike ran and picked some of the berries. They were green and smelled funny, sort of like bad pepperoni, but she was so hungry she didn’t even notice.
“’Maybe you shouldn’t eat those,’ Buggly said, but before he finished his sentence, Mike swallowed a handful of the berries.
“’Oh,’ she said right away. ‘Those tasted yucky.’ Her stomach started to hurt.”
“Just like mine,” Michaela said.
“Just like yours.” Adam felt his hand on her stomach growing warm. He wished he could make her pain go away.
“Buggly realized that they were in a bad part of the forest,” Adam continued. “It was full of bad feelings and scary things. It was no place for a little girl. He didn’t think it was a very good place for bears to be, either. He picked Mike up in his big hairy arms and began to run. Mike thought that maybe things were chasing them, but she knew Buggly could run faster than anything. She knew they would get out of the bad place. But her tummy still hurt.”
“Not as bad,” Mike said from the bed. Adam smiled and looked at Holly. She smiled back.
“Soon,” Adam said, “they were out of the bad woods. Buggly had found a big cave where they would be safe. The inside of the cave was full of pretty diamonds and jewels, so it glowed like a rainbow. He found a patch of soft green moss, which smelled like flowers, and laid Mike on it.
“’Whew’ said the bear, and wiped the sweat off his furry brow. ‘I’m glad to be out of there.’
“‘Me too,’ said Mike from the bed of moss. ‘But my tummy still hurts a little.’
“’Close your eyes’ said Buggly. ‘I’m going to show you an old bear trick.’ He placed his big paw gently on his friend’s tummy and began to sing. It was a song they both knew, and sang together a lot.”
“I’m a little airplane, yow, yow,” Mike sang to Adam. Her eyes were closed, and her voice was fading into sleep. She still held his hand in place.
“Sure,” Adam said. “So Buggly sang ‘I’m a little airplane’ and the strangest thing happened. His paw began to glow on Mike’s tummy. It felt warm to her, and good, and pretty soon her tummy felt all better.”
“All better,” Mike mumbled. She was asleep a moment later. Her hand dropped slowly away from his. Adam smiled, then bent forward and kissed her forehead. He stood, careful not to jar the bed too much, and pulled the blankets up around her. He tiptoed out of the room.
“You’re amazing,” Holly whispered to him.
“What happened,” he asked. “Are you all right?” She wrapped her arms around his waist and allowed herself to be pulled close for a comforting embrace.
“Could you put your hands on my tummy and make it all better,” she said with a quivery voice.
* * * * *
Holly stirred her Red Zinger tea listlessly. It had gone cold while she told Adam about Billy’s visit, and about his threat. Adam gulped his Earl Grey in an attempt to drown the anger that was swimming up his throat. It didn’t work.
He stood and paced the kitchen, restless, full of energy. The rage he had been trying to deny came back with a new focus. He wanted to hit something, Billy Haught specifically. He leaned against the sink and took several deep breaths, invoking the relaxation techniques he had taught to his clients. He visualized his safe place, a jeweled cave with a moss bed, Holly and Mike safely inside with him, and tried to calm down.
“Who the hell does he think he is?” he asked.
“Mike’s father,” Holly said.
“Like that’s ever mattered before. Where’s he been for the last four years? He never wanted her before. God, he wanted you to kill her before she was born.” He grimaced at that turn of phrase. Philosophically he was pro-choice, but Mike was a living being he loved. If Billy had had his way she wouldn’t be here.
“Why now?” Adam walked behind Holly and put his hands on her shoulders. Her muscles were tense and knotted. He kneaded them gently.
“I don’t know,” Holly said through a sound of pleasure and relief. “How did you know I needed that?” Adam shrugged, and continued to rub her flesh.
“He was serious, though,” Holly continued as she slipped into his ministrations like a warm bath. “I think I was more afraid of him today than I was when… Well, when he raped me. That was bad, but I could live through it. Today he was threatening all of us. That made it worse, somehow.”
“He won’t hurt you or Mike, if I can help it,” Adam said, though he wasn’t sure how to make that promise stick. “So what do we do?”
“Leave,” Holly said. Adam’s hands were warm against her skin. She thought of Mike and her hurt tummy, and Adam taking the pain away.
“Just run away?”
“We’re planning on moving anyway, so why not go now? I talked to the landlord this afternoon after Billy left. We’ll still be responsible for the last months rent, and we’ll lose the security deposit, but so what? That’s a small price to pay to get away from him.”
“What’s to stop him from following us?” Adam asked.
“Nothing, I guess. But Canaan isn’t easy to find. I’m not going to tell him where we’re going, are you?”
“Not hardly.”
“So tomorrow I call Mom and have her hire the movers she told me about. We start packing and go before anyone knows we’re gone. It’s not like either of us have to give notice at a job. I can call Sheila and let her know, but I can work from down there as easily as here. I’m looking forward to it, actually.”
“What can I do?”
“Recover,” she said. “Figure out what you want to do. What you want to be.” She seized one of his hands and brought it forward and kissed his palm. It felt hot under her lips. Her shoulders felt wonderful.
“Are you okay?” he asked again. She nodded, then stood and led him out of the kitchen, turning off the lights as they went.
“I’m fine,” she whispered as they started up the steps. “Though, there are other parts of me that could benefit from those wonderful hands of yours.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Billy Haught sipped at the plastic cup of Rolling Rock then set it on the raised edge of the stage. Guns-n-Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle reverberated in the small, smoke-filled room. The dim overhead lights strobed and flashed, bright and sharp in Billy’s marijuana haze. A tall dancer with the unlikely name of Suede was peeling off her g-string in front of the man sitting across from him.
“Gimme a dollar,” she crooned in a faux little-girl voice.
The Sugar Wall was a small strip club in the middle of nowhere south of Pittsburgh. It was little more than a tin shack off the interstate, really. If the girls weren’t as attractive as in the upscale clubs in town, at least the drink prices were.
Billy pulled a stack of dollar bills out of his shirt pocket and laid them next to the cup. The torn picture of Michaela sat on top. He picked it up and looked at it briefly, not really able to believe that she was his daughter. He had only seen her once, and that had been brief. The reality of her life wasn’t completely real to him.
That was true of a lot of things these days.
Suede turned to Billy and crawled across the stage to him. She leaned over him, brushing her breasts and platinum hair, none of which was real, across his face. Cheap perfume lingered in her passing.
“Hi Billy,” she whispered. Later, she would hand most of the tips she made tonight to him in exchange for the cocaine he had stashed in his car. If she didn’t have enough cash, they would work something out. Blow-for-Blow it was called in the trade. Now, she simply danced for him. There were bruises on her thighs and pimples on her butt.
Coke wasn’t Billy’s drug of choice, but it brought in the most cash. He preferred the hallucinogenics: pot, acid, ‘shrooms. The habit started in high school and blossomed in college. Billy was an artist; at least he had believed so for a long time. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He took the drugs to loosen up his creativity, and whenever he felt blocked on a project he would take more. Eventually his creativity became so loose he lost his grip on it entirely. He opened the doors of his perception, but while he was staring into his visions, some small piece of madness crawled in around the jamb.
He slipped a dollar into Suede’s garter, brushing a finger lightly against her inner thigh as he did so.
“Thanks,” she said, trying to sound sexy, then crawled on to her next victim. Billy had to give Suede credit… she worked for her dollars. The last girl, Xena, an overweight brunette with too many tattoos, had worked her routine in a perfunctory manner, her mind obviously somewhere else. The patrons here paid for a fantasy. Most of them could be ignored by women in their real lives.
Holly wasn’t going to ignore him anymore. She would know that Billy Haught was someone to be reckoned with, and if her new husband got in the way, well so much the better. What right did he have to interfere with a man and his daughter?
Billy put a dollar on the stage for the next dancer, then pushed back his chair and stood. He drained the warm foam from the bottom of the cup and walked to the bar. He motioned for a refill, then slipped a buck into the tip jar. While this was taking place three of the dancers asked if he was interested in a private show. The girls here worked for tips only, and a percentage of the twenty-dollar lap dances. If they didn’t drum up business they went home broke. Billy declined. He had the cash, but his head wasn’t into it tonight. He had other things on his mind.
He wasn’t sure when his obsession with reclaiming his daughter had started. Holly was right; he hadn’t been interested up until now. He wanted nothing to do with either of them. He had just wanted to forget that night, pretend he didn’t know it had been rape, pretend that he didn't know her at all. When she told him she was pregnant all he could see was a future chained to a woman he didn’t love, supporting a child he didn’t want. Holly didn’t want to be stuck with him either. An abortion seemed like the obvious answer. It’s not like it would be the first time he had paid for one.
But Holly freaked out at the suggestion. He remembered her throwing the money back in his face, though somehow he had come to believe she kept it. The argument escalated, and Billy remembered hitting her.
Repeatedly.
When he went to her apartment to apologize a couple of days later she was gone. Through the grapevine at college he heard she had gone into a women’s shelter. The next day he was served with a restraining order. Though the terms of it had long since passed, he had just stayed away.
He pulled the ragged picture of Michaela out of his pocket. Why did he want her now, after all this time? He and Holly knew enough of the same people that he had heard when his daughter was born. It wasn’t hard to find out where. He went to the hospital and stared through the glass at the tiny pink bundle. Holly had given Michaela her own last name, denying his role entirely. Billy wanted to find Holly then. A small part of him wanted to do the right thing, but a much larger part was frightened and pissed off that this had come into his life.
He was going to the nurse’s station to ask where Holly was when he encountered her mother. Carol had never met him before, but she knew who he was. She was a wall of condemnation, quiet and firm. She told him what she thought of him in no uncertain terms, and that she expected him to leave and never bother any of them again. His anger and resolve had withered before her implacable will. He slunk away from the hospital determined to do as she had asked. He doubted that Holly had ever been told he was even there.
“Hey!” said the bartender, “Put that away. What kind of freak are you, pulling that out in here?”
“It’s my daughter, asswipe,” Billy said.
“You sick fuck.” The bartender shook his head and walked away. He would have kicked Billy out if he didn’t need a good dealer.
