Black Water Tales: The Secret Keepers (9 page)

Regina’s body exploded to life, safe under the quilt that her aunt Charlene had made for her when she was a child. Regina looked down to see her chest heaving up and down through the Oakley high school t-shirt. She looked toward her bedroom door at the sound of the classical music floating into her room from down stairs. What possessed her mother to play the piano this late, Regina thought, as she looked toward the bedroom door, where she saw a shadow. Someone was standing in the door silhouetted by the light in her parents’ room down the hall.

We don’t have a piano
. Regina suddenly thought to herself.

Blood pumped through the veins in her temples; she rubbed her eyes harder this time, telling herself that she was still dreaming. She looked again and the shadow had gone as quickly as it had come. Regina leaned forward in the bed to be sure and her eyes widened when she felt a draft of air prickle her legs as someone lifted the cover to climb in next to her.

She turned her quaking body and was face-to-face with what she knew was her best friend. The skull had been collapsed on one side; the lush head of black hair was now just dusty and jagged strands. Most of the smooth skin of her beautiful face had rotted, leaving only the skeletal remains, one of the pieces of torn skin that remained hung from the bottom left corner of the mouth revealing teeth and bone. Despite all, her eyes remained the same; Lola’s dark round eyes glittered kaleidoscopically as the two rows of teeth moved up and down.

“Regina,” the stinking corpse spoke in a broken wiry whisper.

Regina gasped violently as she shot upright in her bed safe under that same quilt that her aunt Charlene had made for her when she was a child.

“Jesus,” she called with a relieved breath as she grasped her chest through the purple tank top that she had put on before bed.

Regina grappled in her bed all night long. She wanted to sleep, but had no desire to meet with the ghastly Lola again that
night. The stars dazzled her room, and she moved to the window seat and stared out at the landscape of the cold empty street and the vast and unending night sky. She lamented her return to this tortuous place, a place that held a vast emotional chamber of memories for the woman who now felt like a girl. Regina sat in silence, every other moment seeking out each creak and whistle of the old house before resolving it to natural noise and focusing her attention back to the outside world.

Trees swayed in the October breeze, most of their leaves already having abandoned them. The wind chimes that her mother put on the house years ago sang a soothing melody. Regina could see through the branches and watched the stillness of the dead houses along the block; her eyes were focused on the Laney home at the far end of the block when she saw their porch light flicker to life. She wondered why someone would be turning a light on at this godforsaken time of morning, but before she could think too much the light on the Garretts’ front porch lit up, then the light on the next house and the next. The invisible energy that awakened the lights was making its way up the block, headed straight for Regina’s home. Regina couldn’t take her eyes off the parade of illumination until a moment after the bulb on the porch of their next-door neighbor burst to light. Regina turned her head slowly to her bedroom door; she was sure that the porch light on their home had come to life and there was something downstairs at the door, she waited for the bell to ring, her heart pounding as she waited.

The buzzing of the bell effortlessly raised the hair on her body. Regina anticipated the sound though that did nothing to curb its devastating effect. It rang and rang; the buzzing was continuous, never conceding to silence. A moment later she realized that the sound was not the doorbell at all, but the alarm clock in her room that she had used in high school. Regina shut off the alarm and quickly turned back to the houses on Pine Street. All of the porch lights were still on and she wondered if they had been that way all along.

The rising sun allowed its golden colors to bleed out into the sky and Regina could recall only a few other times in life that she had been more relieved. Now she could sleep peacefully and somehow the sunlight that poured into her room would protect her.

Spirits would have to shrink back into the shadowy corners, not allowed to step into the truth of the light because the fictional components of their existence forbade it. Regina crawled into the cool sheets of her bed and within moments of giving up the fight, she drifted into a sound and, thank God, dreamless sleep.

The hands on the old-fashioned alarm clock indicated that it was 10:00 a.m., which seemed impossible because it had been 6:00 a.m. when she finally drifted off and her exhausted body felt like it could not have been sleeping for more than fifteen minutes. The sounds of morning were coming from downstairs. Regina could not recall the last time she had been able to sleep in. Her father had taken vacation days in order to be home with his daughter; she could hear the television and was sure that her father was front and center on the couch catching up on all of the shows that he never got to watch since he was never at home during the weekdays. Her mother had been finished cooking for hours, but Regina still smelled the strong aroma of fresh country bacon that sat thick in the air. She stretched under the sheets before she balled up in the fetal position and tried to rekindle her unconscious state. It was as if she was sixteen all over again and for a moment she was glad of it, Regina enjoyed the feeling of not having anything to do or anywhere to be. Soon her mother would have her father in the yard cutting the grass, she knew.

“Might as well get it done so that you don’t have to fool with it on the weekend.” She could hear her mother saying to her father.

“Pat, don’t drive me crazy today, please!” he would shoot back in the voice he used when he was trying to convince people that he was not the total pushover that he was.

“Regina,” her mother’s voice crept into the room, disturbing her innocent thoughts.

The girl poked her head from under the sheets.

“I thought I heard you moving around in here. You hungry, you want some coffee?” her mother offered.

“Yes and yes,” she said hardly recognizing her voice, which had reverted to a childish squeak.

After tossing two or three more times under the weight of the quilt, Regina was finally able to rouse herself from the comfortable bed and walk down the drafty hallway toward the bathroom. She stopped in front of a mirror that decorated the hall. Regina admired the ornamented woodwork that framed the glass and was relieved that all of the mirrors in the house had been restored to the walls. A cramp wrenched Regina’s gut at a memory of the day when they had all been broken. After that day, her father never replaced the mirrors and the house was almost completely free of them still on the day that Regina left for college. Regina placed her palm in the center of the mirror as if she had missed it personally and admired her reflection before continuing on to the bathroom.

She used her hand to pull back the blue and yellow shower curtain and sighed at the sight of the bathtub; she could not believe that people still had these old-fashioned claw-footed tubs. Admittedly, there was something romantic about them, but she wished that her parents would update. In the mirror, Regina looked into her own tired eyes, with one hand testing their puffiness and with the other she brushed her teeth hard.

As Regina leaned over the sink to spit, she could hear the lawn mower revving to a start and she giggled.

“How did you sleep?” Mrs. Dean asked her puffy-eyed daughter as she entered the kitchen squinting to protect her eyes from the abundance of sunlight that poured in through the windows.

Regina was honest as she sat down to the plate that was already sitting on the table. “I had nightmares.”

Regina dug into the plate of eggs and buttered toast with peach jam. “How can you eat that stuff?” she asked her mother who sat across the table eating toast with pepper jam. “I never understood pepper jam.” Regina added.

“The same way that you eat hot sauce on everything.,” her mother shot back.

“Well, I do that because it tastes good which cannot possibly be the reason that you eat pepper jam.” Regina teased her mother while arching one side of her upper lip in sync with the lift of her eyebrows.

“I just developed a taste for it,” her mother told her.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Mrs. Dean asked.

“About what?” Regina gurgled her words in a mouthful of coffee. Regina could already see what was coming. Her mother was too dramatic, always feeling the need to talk about everything and Regina was the opposite or at least somewhere in the middle. Her mother actually wanted to discuss things because she thought it would be for the better, her father never wanted to discuss things because he let them go just as quickly as they came about. Regina was somewhere in the middle, not because she was sometimes serious about things and sometimes she let them go, but because she was always serious about things, but always pretended to let them go. Most of the time she was just confused about how to feel.

“Your dream, Regina,” her mother interrupted her thought.

“Not really. This whole thing is just creepy, you know,” Regina finished. Her mother nodded as if she agreed.

“I don’t think that it’s creepy so much as it is just tragic,” Her mother explained.

“How are the Rushers?” Pat asked her daughter.

Dropping her toast to her plate, Regina was no longer able to maintain her appetite. The night before Regina had been able to get out of this conversation simply by telling her parents that she didn’t want to talk about it, but it was doubtful she would get that lucky twice. Regina pushed hard to swallow the lump of chewed food that was in her mouth; it stuck in her throat.

“They’re as great as you can be when the body of your daughter who has been missing for eight years turns up chopped to bits.” Regina spoke the words with half-frustrated bite, half-dark humor.

“Regina!” her mother scolded her by saying her name with that calm but penetrating strike that all mothers had mastered, like a mother lioness clawing at her inexperienced cub.

“They’re wrecked, Mom! Is that what you want to hear?” Regina shaped the fingers on both of her hands into claws and dragged them through her short, straight, stylishly cut hair. Fighting the irritation that Regina felt at being forced to discuss this with her parents was becoming impossible.

“No, of course not, but I can’t take sarcasm right now.” Mrs. Dean clenched her jaw and moved her hands around nervously in the pockets of her robe.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Regina apologized. “I’m gonna go and put on some clothes. Thanks for breakfast.”

Her mother didn’t respond. The banister was hard against Regina’s hand and she used it to balance herself as she trotted up the stairs. She pulled her suitcase out of the closet, threw it open on the floor, and began searching for something to wear.

Today, she needed to see Nikki and that was the only thing that she knew for sure. As she pulled pieces of clothing out of the case, she thought,
What will I say to Nikki? What will Nikki say to me? Would she be angry? Happy to see me? What?

Nothing was certain and the knots that were now forming in her stomach only furthered that uncertainty.

Regina laid her favorite pair of jeans across the top half of the bag, a pair of distressed skinny jeans with a silver zipper that went from the top of the calf down to the ankle. She paired it with an old sweatshirt out of which she had cut the collar, causing the top to fall lazily across one shoulder. A soft scratching caused her to glance up at the window. Two brown, naked tree branches were scraping the window. Regina got up, walked over to the window, and pressed her hand against it; it was cool. Her mother had taught her to do that in order to get a rough estimate of the temperature outside before dressing. She looked over the houses that lined the desolate street. Trees blew in the wind, but the houses were so still, there was no movement in or around them at all which caused Regina to feel as if they were empty inside.

Empty.

Nothing moved on Pine Street. They had all been forsaken. The drab room was quiet. Regina backed away from the chilled
window and felt something brush up against her back, she felt air. Someone was breathing on her. Regina turned to see a face, tired, used; the face of Nikki Valentine. Her skin lacked the flawless teenage luster it was once full with; her eyes had been glazed by the undesirable sight of a world with no direction. The once high shine of her hair had faded into a listless glimmer caught only when under a perfect light angle of the sun. She was an older and more experienced Nikki Valentine. Regina hugged her friend and smelled the odor of alcohol that had been left on her sometime that morning. Regina pulled away from the girl so that she could look her over.

“So what I had a shot in my coffee, sue me.” Nikki read her mind, speaking in the same lush and scratchy voice Regina heard on the phone a couple of nights ago. Before Regina could respond, she felt her lips spreading in wild delight and then threw her arms around the troubled girl once again. Even in her apparent anguish, she was still the funny girl that Regina had always known and loved. Regina couldn’t explain it, but felt a great relief at the sight of her old friend. Possibly because Nikki could actually anchor her to a reality of the situation and it would no longer be just a ghastly nightmare. Or maybe just because despite everything that had happened Nikki was her friend, one of the only true friends that she had ever had in the world and just being near her was a tremendous comfort that she never knew she missed before.

The reasonable period for a friendly hug had long passed and Regina was aware of this fact, but just couldn’t bear to let Nikki go. Nikki held her friend gratefully and took in the scent of tropical coconuts that wafted from Regina’s hair, she felt her eyes beginning to tense, but managed to hold back the storm of tears that threatened to erupt from her with distracting thoughts and two deep breaths.

“If the big city has turned you into a complete lesbian, I’m OK with that, but I’m starting to get a little claustrophobic,” Nikki teased.