Fear Itself (12 page)

In any event, I sat waiting, my head turning every time a car pulled into view, for our first meeting in the parking-lot of an appointed fast-food restaurant in Wichita Kansas while Sarah picked at the salty french- fries from the carton of her kid’s meal. As much as I had longed to enact a physical encounter with Amber the truth was that given the circumstances I was more concerned with Sarah’s and my future living arrangements; the natural order of human necessity—food-shelter- sex—having predicated my disposition. I hadn’t given Amber much time to make the arrangements and I hoped that she did not intend to place us in some cockroach infested shanty; that is if she was able to make any arrangements at all. My money would not carry me far if I had to continue to pay for motel rooms.

I watched as a pretty young brunette with a pale complexion and a small lithe frame walked toward me and then past me. Sarah and I had been waiting for over an hour past our scheduled meeting time of one-thirty and I began to worry that Amber would not show. I watched as the brunette made her way along the cars in the parking-lot as if she had lost her car, but she had only just pulled in a few moments earlier in a blue mini-pickup truck. The young woman turned back once again surveying the cars until she stopped at my car door and signaled for me to roll down my window.

“Nice car! Are you Mathew?” she smiled.

“Yes.” I was more than a little confused. This girl did not look like the woman in the photograph that Amber had sent to me nor did she sound like Amber. She was dressed in a low-cut leather miniskirt, the sort that I imagined a prostitute might wear, and long matching leather boots, with fat two-inch thick heels, that ended just below her knees. In her exposed navel she wore a diamond bellybutton ring with a stone the size of a sunflower seed. Her top, a plain white but low- cut blouse, was tied by the tails in a bow above her narrow midriff. Her breasts were smallish, the size of oranges, but were pushed together so as to look as if they were larger than they actually were. Her face was made-up just a bit too heavily. She had narrow lips and a pug Irish looking nose that looked cute below her large green eyes and her long black eyelashes. “You’re not Amber…are you?”

“No silly; Amber couldn’t make it.” She waved her hand back airily as if amused at my mistake, “She said something about being followed by her husband and asked me to meet you here. My name is Melanie. I used to work with Amber. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for

Amber.” She said stroking a set of long neatly manicured red fingernails across her breastbone. Amber had mentioned a girlfriend she had been intimate with once upon a time and I wondered if Melanie was that someone.

“That’s great.” A knot balled up in my stomach at the thought of having come so close to being caught. I was thankful that Amber had been as alert as she was. “Did Amber make any living arrangements for us?”

“She did, but I don’t know if you’re going to like them. She hasn’t found you a place yet so she asked me to let you stay at my place. It’s not very big but I live alone. And it’s safe.” She gave a knowing smile revealing a perfect set of pearl-white teeth. “Follow me. I’m in the little blue pickup.” She swayed her hips and pointed in the wrong direction and then giggled and corrected her mistake.

Melanie sashayed away; her tiny butt cheeks flexing alternately in a manor that suggested that she knew how to attract attention, and she climbed into her little blue mini-pickup-truck. What choice did I have but to trust the young friend of my friend? I pulled behind her and followed.

“Who is she daddy?” Sarah looked up at me with a petulant frown, as if threatened by the competition of another female.

“She’s just someone who’s going to help us for a few days.”

“Okay.” Sarah said cheerfully and went on playing with a toy she had pulled from her kids’ meal (a black, red robot gismo) as if her discontented mood were contrived.

We drove along the main thoroughfare for a few miles, past clusters of modern storefronts and fast-food restaurants, before turning down side-streets lined with well kept cottages and bungalows with small but neat green lawns and stretches of road that subsidized the long narrow driveways as additional parking space. We drove until we reached a typical aluminum sided white slab- ranch home with black shutters and an asphalt roof. I followed Melanie into the driveway and watched as she got out and waved to me at the side door signaling me to come in.

I pulled Sarah by the hand trying to hide her reluctant resistance to enter the house of a stranger. Once inside the kitchen, the room to which the side door opened, I was overcome by a surprising barrage of smells: cinnamon, brown sugar, olive oil, freshly baked almond cookies, Italian bread and the faint whiff of the fruity, almost tropical, perfume worn about the slender wrists and narrow neck of our hostess. Melanie didn’t dress like a homemaker but her kitchen indicated otherwise. From another room I could hear the ting-ting-ting of a symbol being rattled as an upbeat jazzy lyric-less tune softly hummed through a hi-fi stereo. The kitchen, for such a small and older home, was spacious and modern with a vaulted ceiling and maple cupboards and Corian countertops. The dinette table was covered with baking items; a thick pasty wad of brown cookie dough, a variety of cookie cutters, rolling pins, pie-tins and cookie sheets. A set of salt and pepper shakers molded as Pilgrim and Indian, precursors of the upcoming holiday (in my grief and haste to escape I had forgotten how close the holiday was), lay perched on the edge of an almond colored stove.

“I’m sorry. We’ve interrupted your baking.” I said trying to discard the awkward sensation of my intrusion into the privacy of a stranger’s personal space. I felt, as when I was forced as a child on untolled family vacations to stay in the homes of unfamiliar aunts and uncles, the uncomfortable self-consciousness of an interloper, completely unsure of the invisible lines that separated the acceptable level of impingement from the requisite measure of penetration. Our selfless benefactor, apparently recognizing my emotional displacement, raised her cheeks in a genuine display of smiling teeth and waived us forward as she backed through the doorway to the adjacent room.

“I really want you to make yourself at home here.” She turned her back to us and led us, her boots clapping like a horses hooves over the shiny oak plank flooring, through a living room encircled with a powder-blue sectional sofa, eggshell-white walls smattered with pasty pastel paintings of Parisian street scenes and a warm sandstone fireplace with the aroma of the previous nights fire still fresh on the air. “I would just hate myself if I thought that you didn’t feel at home here.” She led us down a short narrow hallway, “The bathroom is over here, excuse the mess.” She pointed at the partially opened door of a room darkened by navy-blue ceramic tile and the filtered sunlight through a set of pink mesh curtains and no discernable mess in sight. “Amber is
like
my closest friend in the world and I’m just happy that I could return one of the favors she’s done for me.” She said as she pointed me into a small sparsely furnished guest bedroom with a full size carved cherry bed and a tall chest of cherry drawers. “You’ll have to share the bed unless one of you wants the couch in the living room.”

“This will do nicely.” I smiled. “I’m really very grateful. It’s very generous of you to put yourself out for perfect strangers.” I looked down at my feet, embarrassed for being on the receiving end of Melanie’s charity.

Melanie raised her hand to the side of my face and lifted my chin with the baby-soft skin of her fingers against the chafe of my uncut whiskers until our eyes met, “My house is your house.” Her eyes were soft and kind and moist with emotion, “Amber didn’t tell me much about your situation, but she did say that you were a friend of hers in need, and that is all I need to know. You’ll be safe here until other arrangements can be made. In the meantime I want you to treat this house as if it were your own. If you want something from the fridge I don’t expect you to ask. Just help yourself.” She dropped her hand from my face and down to her side, “If you only knew what Amber did for me you would know that I mean what I say.”

“Thank you.” I said, a bit choked up by her sincere generosity.

“Would you like to help me make cookies Sarah?” she said looking down at Sarah who was adhered to me like a barnacle to a boat.

Sarah looked up at me anxiously. I nodded and she grinned up at Melanie, “Sure.” she said. And Sarah trailed behind Melanie toward the kitchen. I stripped to my boxers and collapsed into the bed and fell asleep, truly asleep, for the first time in almost a week.

As you can imagine my exhaustion had caught up with me and I fell so hard asleep that I might as well have been dead except for the crazy dreams that tormented my slumber. We were having a party at our house, Catherine and I, and people we knew both dead and alive from past and from present, were there; Teresa and Albert were dancing in what had grown from our tiny living room into the giant terrazzo covered church devoid of pews and set up as a cathedral ballroom and Teresa waltzed toward me and then by me (I was standing with Catherine) and scowled at me and growled “I knew you would kill her you perverted shit!” and then she twirled away from me and was gone. I turned to Catherine and said, “What is she talking about?” but I found that instead of

Catherine Amber was standing at my side. “I don’t know darling, did you kill Catherine? I need to know because if you’re planning to kill me too, I’m leaving!” and Amber danced away with detective Bergant who just happened by and he shook a scolding finger at me, “As soon as this party is over Mister, I’m taking you in.” and then he laughed as if he were only kidding. Teresa and Albert waltzed by again and Albert said, “You know, I think Tommy Sullivan killed Teresa! He left town right after Teresa died, didn’t he Teresa?” Albert was looking at Teresa waiting for her to answer as they had come to a complete stop, “I don’t know dear, let’s ask him. He’s over there.” Teresa was pointing at Sarah and Tommy who were standing by a punch-bowl arguing with one another, “You killed Catherine!” Tommy pointed an accusing finger down at Sarah, “No! You killed her! You killed Teresa too! You’re just a dirty rotten killer!” Sarah ran over to me and held my hand and looked back at Tommy and said, “But you better not kill my daddy! We’re married.” Tommy, not being one to lose an argument stared at Sarah with angry eyes, “You can’t marry Matt! He’s your dad.” “I can too.” “Can not!” “Can too, and I’ll prove it.” And Sarah unzipped my trousers. “No honey, you can’t do that! How many times have I told you?” Catherine, who was now holding hands with Detective Bergant, scolded Sarah. My heart was racing and I was sweating profusely. As I slowly slipped from my dream to consciousness I was both horrified and amazed that I could actually feel a pair of warm moist lips wrapped around my penis and I screamed out “No! Sarah! No!” as I bolted upright in bed and in the darkness of the night (as I was to find out I had slept for almost thirty hours) I found a Beautiful golden-haired goddess completely naked kneeling between my legs, in my bed, and she nearly ripped my erupting phallus from its socket when I sat up and screamed at her.

“Damn!” Yelled the goddess, her eyes white and wide and wild in the cast of the little plug-in nightlight, “You scared the hell out of me.” Amber’s distinct southern voice whispered scornfully from in front of me. I was still in shock from the horror of my dream; I felt like a pedophile once again. I sat and I stared at Amber’s face in the dark trying to gain my bearings; trying to separate dream from reality and trying to overcome the vile sensation building in my stomach for having violated Sarah once again in a dream.

“Well aren’t you gonna say something?”

“Like what?”

“How about ‘Damn Amber! You sure do suck a mean dick!’”

“Amber, you have a hell of a way of introducing yourself!” My pulse was gradually slowing but my nausea persisted.

“Well you were sleeping, and it was already pretty hard, and to be honest I was a little horny.” She giggled.

“You’re crazy.”

“No, just horny lover! You make me that way.” I could see her bright smile by the light that seeped into the room through the window and seemed to cast directly on her teeth. She was talking in the comically-sluttish manner in which she liked to speak on the phone, and in the dark, her image still dull and scratchy like an old black-and-white movie, it was is if we were talking on the phone still miles apart.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Well I was a lot better until you scared the hell out of me.” She put her hands on her hips feigning anger, but naked as she was she didn’t quite pull it off.

“Thank you…for setting this up.” I reached out and held her hand. “Melanie is one fantastic girl.”

“Isn’t she though? We go way back. She’s a sweetheart.”

“Is it okay for you to be here so late?” I looked over at the clock on my nightstand and noted that it was past one a.m. “I mean your husband didn’t have you followed or anything?” Bringing her husband into mind seemed wrong even if only in words but I needed her reassurance that we were not in danger.

“I think the good detective got bored with me. I saw that he was following me so I called Melanie to have her meet you and then I took the private
dick
,” she placed her free hand under my prick and flipped it like she was tossing a hotcake, “to every shoe store in

Wichita.” She drawled the word
Wichita
. “Won’t your husband be wondering where you are?”

“Charlie? No. I called him from my sister’s house so he could see her number on the caller I.D. and I told him that we were playing cards and that I wouldn’t be home until very late.” Amber pulled herself a little closer to me and slid her hand along my thigh while she lifted her legs over mine and straddled me.

“Where is Sarah?”

“She’s asleep on the couch.” Amber slid a little closer, shuffling forward on her knees, still straddling me.

I never thought that in my lifetime I would ever know another woman intimately. I never thought I would want to, but then I never thought that Catherine would want to either. But with the heat of Amber’s smooth thighs against my own my lust overwhelmed my nausea and I found that I wanted her very much. I found that, despite the pain I felt at Catherine’s betrayal, I had no problem becoming a party to another man’s emotional disquietude. Instead, his loss was my gain.