Dead Spell (6 page)

Pat opened his arms in greeting and headed in her direction. “You go to your uncle’s office,” he said to Brea out of the corner of his mouth. “I’ll try to calm down your mother.”

Brea held her portfolio behind her back and stayed close to the wall as she walked. Her mother didn’t approve of hanging out in cemeteries.

Lance plowed through the front door, raging.

“Now it’s a party,” Brea said.

Pat hugged Joan and spoke loud enough that Brea heard him trying to get her out of trouble. There was no way that was happening. Her mother was still screaming.

“No bull, Pat. Let me at her.”

“Joan, she really wasn’t the one…”

Harmony kicked and thrashed loudly in the holding cell, pounding the glass with her fists. Lance was on the other side of the window shouting something about the fact that she drugged him.

Funny, Brea thought he only drugged himself.

“Mike, get him out of here.”

Mike pulled Lance away and directed Joan into Jim’s office where she and everyone else within earshot overheard Lance’s yarn about how Harmony stole his car—leaving out that he screwed and tattooed her first.

Jim’s office hadn’t changed in over twenty years and was a testament to his single, focused life. His unadorned metal desk was centered in the room, two chairs in front of it—his, behind. The walls were covered in various plaques of commendation and the only picture was of Brea and her mother from when Brea was three-years-old.

Brea tucked her portfolio behind her uncle’s desk and tried to come up with some explanation, any explanation that might lessen the impending punishment. “Mom, let me explain.” She stalled, keeping Pat strategically between her and her mother.

She wasn’t looking for an explanation and her otherwise china-white complexion grew quickly red. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to get a call at this hour of the morning that my daughter’s been arrested?”

“No, not arrested,” Pat said.

“Whatever. At the police station for pick-up?” She looked at Pat to see if he agreed with her terminology. “I told you Harmony is trouble, Brea. The kind of people she comes from…”

“Mom. That’s unfair. Her mother isn’t her fault. And she didn’t steal the car. He told her she could use it. This whole thing is bullshit.”

Joan looked at Pat, trying her best to ignore Brea's open use of profanity. "Are we done here?"

 “We’ll finish this at home.” Her hand clamped around Brea’s bicep.

“But Mom, you can’t leave her here. She has no one to come get her.”

“She should’ve thought about
that
before she stole a car.”

“For the last time, she didn’t steal it.” Brea dug her muddy flip flops into the floor and pulled  back in protest. “I’m not leaving without her.”

“Jim, a hand over here, please?”

Just as her uncle started to come over, Adam appeared at the clerk’s window.

 “I got her,” he said, counting out a stack of bills for bail
.
He slipped what was left of the wad of cash into the back pocket of his slim-fit jeans and pushed his blue-streaked bangs out of his eyes.

“See,
he’s
got her.” Joan scowled and pulled Brea past the holding room.

Harmony saw Adam and pulled away from the window, sitting back down on the bench, quiet.

Adam thanked Gina, the clerk, for calling him and waited for Mike to open the door.

11
.

“Thank God she called you.” Harmony scooted across the bench seat of Adam’s truck and curled up against him, but he pushed her away.

“I don’t even want to know how
this
happened.” He held up her tattooed wrist. “Is this why you couldn’t see me tonight? Big plans with the tattooist?” He shook his head. “I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with you, Harmony. What don’t I give you?”

“Don’t be mad.” She opened her mouth against his neck and drew out a long, wet kiss.

He wiped the saliva away and shuddered. “I just shelled out half my rent in there and all you have to say is
don’t be mad
?”

“What if I make it up to you?” She reached for the inside of his thigh and he grabbed her tattooed wrist sending a burning pain up her arm. “Now we’re talking. Hurt me.”

There was a flash of disgust in his eyes and she could tell he was going to say something but stopped.

“What, Adam? Are you going to tell me you can fix me? Make this all better? I’m fucking broken. Don’t you get that? There is no fix.”

“Are you off your pills again?”

She laughed. “You think it’s that easy? A few antidepressants and I’m better? My mother doesn’t even get me the pills half the time.”

“And the other half you don’t take them.”

He pulled into the driveway of his apartment building—twelve units, mostly Section 8 subsidized, but a paradise compared to the dump she lived in—and shut off the truck.

He took a black garbage bag from the bed of the truck and marched her out ahead of him. “This has to stop.”

 “What has to stop?” She felt like a prisoner.

“The cheating, the lying, the stealing, the
drugs
. All of it.

He unlocked the apartment and put the bag down on the tile entranceway floor. It sighed open and her favorite things were inside: clothes, her Ouija, her journal, everything that mattered.

“What’s going on? What is all this? What are you doing with my stuff?”

“I talked to Charity. She’s going through some stuff and we both agree that you’re better off here for a while.”

Under other circumstances that would have been good news, but the order to stay spun it differently.

“Better off here? It’s not for you to decide.” She pulled Lance’s tee-shirt over her head and threw it in the garbage. “You’re not my warden and I won’t be on some kind of sick house arrest.” She stood there, topless, waiting for him to acknowledge that or apologize or touch her. She stepped out of her skirt and underwear.

 He stared at her neck, revolted. “What’re you doing, Harmony? Will you put something on?”

“I’m taking a shower.” She stormed off and slammed the door behind her.

The bathroom was drab, olive green tiled from floor to ceiling, and in the soft yellow light she saw what he had been looking at. Four round fingerprint bruises surfaced on her neck where she urged Lance to push harder—to choke her.

She felt dirty, and sick, and angry.

“Why do you keep doing this?”

She turned the shower on so hot that it quickly fogged over the mirror. She wiped a towel across it to see what else she missed.

“You don’t deserve him,” she said to her reflection. “You don’t deserve anyone.”

She slid open the shower curtain and a chill crept up her back. She shuddered and looked over both shoulders.

The swath of cleared mirror went black and the sink faucet turned on.

Tom’s presence surrounded her.

“No. Please. Don’t.”

He knew when she was vulnerable.

Flashes of light like kegs of exploding gunpowder went off in front of her and she slipped on the humidity-soaked tile.

Her tail bone crushed against the side of the tub, her spine thrust upward.

Adam was playing death metal so loud in the living room that the neighbor was pounding the wall.

“Help,” she whispered.

She rolled on to her knees and tried to stand, but Tom grabbed two handfuls of hair and yanked her so hard she thought it would tear out at the roots. There was no reflection, no man, just her hands over her head and her hair whirling and thrashing around them.

“Please…please stop this.”

She clawed her way down the counter to the drawer with the grooming scissors and hacked off her long hair in chunks.

“I told you to let me go.” She fought off the attack.

He lost ground as the tufts of discarded hair rained down on her sweat-soaked skin, clinging to the damp sink, the counter, and floor.

She tore through the last chunk and as fast as he came, he was gone.

She dropped to her knees and squeezed her head. The pain was so intense that it blurred her vision.

It took a minute to clear it.

“I’m going to find you,” she said. “I’ll know who you are and I’ll stop you.”

She climbed into the shower and yielded to its quiet, soothing warmth.

* * * * *

The shower was still running when Adam left the apartment and locked the door behind him. He was hurt and angry, but more at Lance than Harmony.

She always made bad decisions.

One of her legendary bad decisions had brought them together two years ago at one of Lance's parties.

She had just turned fifteen, but said she was older. Lance thought it would be funny to sink her in a game of quarters, to make her drink far more than any ninety pound girl ever should. He was a ringer and she wouldn’t back down.

An hour later she was toxic. Fall-down drunk and the center of attention.