Pieces of Hate (14 page)

“But that’s not where you stood for the group photo when we were in high school,” Amelia said, her smile firmly intact, but her voice becoming just a bit impatient.

“Amelia, dear,” Margaret said, reaching over to touch her sturdy shoulder for just a moment, “we’re not in high school now.”

“But the whole point was to reproduce that picture, with everyone standing in exactly the same places they stood back then.” Amelia sounded as if she were speaking to a child.

“I’d like to stand here.”

“But you can’t.” Amelia’s smile began to twitch.

“I can’t? I’m sorry, Amelia,” Margaret said, still smiling happily, “but I wasn’t given a list of rules at the door.”

Amelia’s smile fell of her face completely and she stood a bit straighter. “This is not the way we decided this would be done.”

“We? We who? Who is we?”

“The reunion committee.”

“But I’m not on the reunion committee,” Margaret said.

“That is precisely my point!”

Margaret’s smile only grew larger. “Well, what coincidence. That is precisely my point, too. I wasn’t on the committee, so I wasn’t around to tell you that I don’t want to stand wherever it is you want me to stand . . . I want to stand here.”

Amelia’s cheeks began to turn the shade of candied apples.

Marty turned his face toward Margaret and touched his lips to the hair that fell over her ear.

“It’s okay if you go stand where they want you to stand,” he whispered.

“But I don’t want to,” she said, turning her head so that their faces were close enough to kiss.

Smiling, he said, “Maybe just to keep the peace, know what I mean?”

Margaret started to respond, but Amelia grabbed her hand first, and began to pull.

“That’s right,” Amelia said. “To keep the peace. A lot of work has been put into this and I think you should respect that. Now why don’t you just come over to the second row, where you’re supposed to be.”

Margaret tried to pull her hand away, but Amelia’s meaty fingers had a firm grip.

“That’s the damned problem!” Margaret snapped. “You people spent four years telling me what I’m supposed to do, who and what I’m supposed to respect and how I’m supposed to act, and you’re not going to do it now!” She kept a tight hold of Marty’s arm.

Amelia slapped her other hand onto Margaret’s wrist and clutched her with her sausage fingers. When she spoke, it was with her lips pulled back and through tightly clenched teeth.

“Then maybe you’d rather not be in the picture at all!”

“Goddamn your fuckin’ eyes, you bitch, let go of me!” Margaret shouted.

The room had become quiet as the attention of all the others turned to Margaret and Amelia and their tugging match.

“Please, Margaret,” Marty said, his voice shaky, “maybe it’s best if you go along with things and not make such a scene.”

Amelia continued to pull on Margaret’s hand and arm with both hands.

“I’m not making a scene!” Margaret blurted. “This fucking cunt is making a scene!”

It happened so suddenly that no one watching the unpleasant scene reacted at first.

First, the blood filled her eyes like tears. Then, it began to spurt ever so lightly, like juice from an orange being peeled, from the corners, spattering her face.

She let go of Margaret’s hand and arm and staggered backward, her arms waving as if she were trying to flag down a cab. A noise came from her throat, a gurgling whimper, and then she fell flat on her back with her arms jutting upward stiffly. Then she began to scream.

Her screams became more shrill as she began to rub at her own eyes and gag on her blood as it spurted upward and came back down in her mouth, and as the others began to gather around her frantically to help . . .

28

“Is re something . . . wrong, Derek?” Lynda asked. “You’ acting . . . like something’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, realty. It’s just that you’re having a couple of problems.”

“Problems?”

“Hey, things have been going pretty well, haven’t they?”

“Yeah . . . they have.”

“So, what’s a couple of problems, huh? That doesn’t mean things aren’t still going well, right? It’s nothing you can’t handle judging from the recovery you’ve had in the last few days. Besides, Dr. Plummer will be here soon to fix things. So, it’s nothing to worry about, right?”

She swept a hand downward over her sweaty face, slowly. “Yeah . . . right.”

“Feeling sick again?”

“Yeah . . . sick again. Got something . . . for me to puke in?”

“Yep,” he said as he leaned over, grabbed the small garbage can, turned it upside down and emptied it of its wrappers and tissues, then held it before Lynda.

She vomited into it violently, with great, thick splashes. Then she collapsed back onto the bed, panting and weak.

Derek glanced into the garbage can before setting it down. He did a double-take.

Lynda had vomited up more of the food she’d eaten, as she had before . . . but this time it was mixed with dark and glistening swirls of blood . . .

29

Someone shouted, “Call an ambulance!”

Someone else replied, “The ambulance just left here a little while ago.”

Several voices rose then, talking, asking questions.

“What was an ambulance doing here?”

“Somebody had a heart attack.”

“I heard it was Daryl Cotch.”

“Really? Is he dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was unconscious.”

“It didn’t look good for him, from what I saw.”

Margaret stared at the writhing Amelia, listening to the voices that came from all around her as Marty put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him.

“My God, what’s wrong with her?” he asked in a whisper.

But she barely heard him. She was beginning to hear her blood rush through her veins with every thunderous beat of her heart.

Goddamn your fuckin eyes, you bitch, let go of me! she had said to Amelia.

And now, Amelia was flopping around on the floor, out of sight now that so many people had gathered around her, with blood gushing from her eyes for no apparent reason.

“Jesus, she’s gonna bleed to death if we don’t do something!” a woman shrieked.

She’d placed her hand on Daryl Cotch’s chest and told him to drop dead . . .

“Call another ambulance, dammit!” a man shouted. “There’s gotta be more than one around here!”

. . . and now he was being driven away by an ambulance because he’d had a heart attack.

“Oh, my God,” Margaret muttered, feeling sick and weak.

Marty held onto her, turned her around so she faced him with both his hands on her shoulders. “Margaret, are you all right? You look awful!”

“What?” she asked faintly, too lost in her own thoughts to make sense of his words

“I said, you look awful. You’re not going to pass out, are you?”

“No, no . . . not gonna pass out.”

“You’re so pale and so . . .” He winced slightly and shook his head without finishing his sentence.

She paid no attention to him. Things were happening inside her head that were beginning to frighten her. Bits of conversation and chunks of memories were beginning to snap together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle . . . and the picture it formed was frightening.

With cold fear clutching her throat, she wondered, What else have I done?

At that moment, there was another scream in the large room, a woman, high and shrill and filled with fear and pain.

The crowd around Amelia began to break up and look for the source of the scream.

When they found it, Margaret put a hand over her mouth. Her purse dropped from beneath her arm as she groaned, “Oh, dear God, what have I done?” into her palm

30

“What the hell’s going on?” Dr. Plummer asked Derek as they met up in the corridor and both headed for Lynda’s room.

“She’s been vomiting,” Derek said, speaking rapidly. “At first I thought it was just all that food she’s been eating. Now it’s mixed with some blood. Blood pressure’s low, pulse is weak, and so is she. Very weak.”

“I was about to send her home,” Dr. Plummer muttered, frowning and clearly puzzled as he entered Lynda’s room with Derek right behind him. He went to her bedside, smiled down at her and said, “Hello, Lynda. I understand you’ve been disobeying house rules by not feeling well.”

She was pale and drawn. The very act of breathing seemed to be an effort for her. “Yeah,” she whispered, “I’m not . . . feeling well.”

Dr. Plummer lowered the side rail, took her blood pressure, felt her pulse in both her wrist and her foot.

“Can you sit up, Lynda?” he asked.

She made a grumbling noise in her throat and turned her head slowly from side to side.

Dr. Plummer sat on the edge of the bed and felt under the edge of her jaw. He made a low “Hmm” sound. Then he reached beneath her arm, probing her armpits with his fingers. He stood quickly and turned to Derek, stepping away from the bed with him, their backs turned to Lynda.

“Somehow, she’s gotten much worse,” he said. “Her lymph nodes are larger than ever. If she’s throwing up blood, I think we should — ”

There was a sudden thick, wet sound behind them and they both spun around.

Lynda had vomited all over herself and the bed.

This time, she had vomited nothing but dark, glistening, red blood.

“Call OR!” Dr. Plummer barked as he rushed to Lynda’s side. “Tell them we’re bringing down an emergency GI bleed stat!”

Derek hurried out of the room.

His eyes were wide, his smooth brow wrinkled with a frown, and his face had paled slightly.

“What the hell has happened?” he whispered to himself . . .

31

It was Natalie who was screaming. She was on the floor about three yards away from the group that surrounded Amelia.

She was kicking her legs and flailing her arms as people gathered around her to help, to see what was wrong.

“My God, Margaret!” Marty hissed, jerking his hands away from her shoulders. “What the hell’s going on?”

Margaret was unable to speak, so she couldn’t have replied even if she’d heard his question. She didn’t even turn to him. Instead, she pulled away from him and moved toward the second group that was forming around Natalie.

Margaret leaned between two people as a woman screamed and ran away from the group with both hands over her mouth, zigzagging through the Queen’s Parlor and out the door.

At first, Margaret could not comprehend what she was seeing. If she’d looked around at the other faces staring down in sickened horror — some of them looking away, and others running away in the direction of the screaming woman — she would have seen that she was not alone. No one seemed able to understand what they were seeing . . . not for several moments, anyway. Then, what was happening to Natalie became clearer, even though it still made no sense, and was no less horrifying.

Natalie lay on her back, her entire body jittering as if she were lying on a cheap motel bed that had been fed several quarters. Her arms and legs were stiff and trembling and jerked occasionally, sometimes violently, as if she’d lost control of them.

Her skin was tightening rapidly.

Actually, “tightening” did not seem to Margaret to be an accurate description. Yes, the skin on her face, neck and hands had tightened so much that those parts of her body looked like the grotesque mask and gloves of a Halloween ensemble.

But it was more accurate to say that the skin was shrinking, because it was beginning to split open. First, over Natalie’s left cheekbone. Then her chin. Then the back of one hand opened up, followed by a section of her scalp just above her forehead. Blood ran from the openings, and began to flow more freely as the cracks in Natalie’s shrinking flesh grew larger and larger, their edges peeling away from her face and head and neck and hands and wrists.

Two things happened at once. First, Natalie’s screams became ragged, wet gagging sounds. Second, her left cheekbone seemed to be crushed, as if by some invisible weight. It made a moist, crunching sound as it made her left eye bulge from its socket. Then her chin seemed to fold slowly inward, into her mouth, with a hideous crack, as her right hand folded in half, right down the middle, until all four of her fingers were pressed together.

As Natalie’s skin continued to peel away, shedding more and more blood, her body began to curl backward, as if she were having a seizure. The popping and breaking sounds that came from all over her body sounded like firecrackers going off in rapid succession.

There was more screaming — from women and men alike — as people continued to turn away, walk away, run away.

Someone, a man, shouted, “What the fuck is going on here?”