The Remedy (12 page)

Marshall looked up at his girlfriend. “Alex?” he said. “Can you hear me? Come on, wake up!”

Still, she didn’t respond.

A gnarly stick lay a few feet to Marshall’s right. He retrieved the limb and reached up to gently prod Alex’s shoulder.

“Come on, baby girl. Wake up for me.”

No response.

“Alex!” Marshall screamed. “Wake up!” He poked the stick into her cheek.

Her eyes fluttered open.

“Ugh,” she moaned groggily, her pupils rolling in her sockets. It was impossible to know the extent of her injuries, but Marshall smiled all the same. She was awake, and that’s all that mattered. They were probably both suffering from concussions, but now at least Alex could help Marshall figure out a way for her to escape and get the hell out of these godforsaken woods.

“There we go,” Marshall soothingly whispered as Alex awoke. ‘It’s okay, baby. I’m here.” But try as he might to maintain this calm charade for Alex’s benefit, he could no longer keep his panic bay. “What the
fuck
happened to you?”

Marshall scanned upward to examine her body and discovered the mangled condition of her ensnared leg. It was obviously broken, and Marshall grimaced at the complications this was sure to bring to their escape.

Alex coughed and winced in pain, jolting her out of her daze. After blinking several times, her eyes finally landed on her boyfriend, a wave of recognition washing over her face.

“Ma…Marshall?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” He looked up and tried to regain his worry-free smile.

“Marshall?”

Orientation and short-term memory were always the last thing to return to a recent victim of head trauma. Marshall could remember how TJ had asked, “What day is it?” about fifteen times once he had come to.

“Yes, honey. It’s me, Marshall. I’m right here.” He was compulsively nodding in an effort to reassure her.

“Marshall!”

Just as Marshall watched Alex’s eyes pop open like a jack-in-the-box, a tremendous force slammed into his knees and sent his feet flaying out from underneath him. In that single moment of hang-time, Marshall felt just like the goons he’d laughed at so many times as a kid in
Home Alone
. But there was no nostalgia when he slammed facedown into the dirt and felt his kneecap nearly shatter under his body weight.

Marshall inhaled to scream but a blow to his ribcage pushed all the oxygen from his lungs with an excruciating snap. Every shallow breath that followed was like a red-hot poker being thrust into his side.

Unable to move and hardly able to breathe, Marshall could do nothing to defend himself from his unknown assailant. Something wet landed on the back of his neck. He assumed it must be his own blood dripping from whatever blunt object had battered him. But when a hard kick to his gut rolled him onto his back, he realized the falling drops were Alex’s tears. Another splashed on his cheek.

“Leave him alone!” Alex wailed, as helpless as her boyfriend. Her plea was returned with the most sadistic, high-pitched laugh Marshall had ever heard.

The broad heel of a muddy boot pressed down against his throat. Through his fading vision, Marshall squinted to see a gaunt man in mechanic’s overalls standing over him and baring his brown teeth in a rotten grin. Over his shoulder rested a long walking stick with a large, solid knob on the end, like an Irishman’s shillelagh. A dark splotch of dried blood stained the cane, and Marshall knew he wasn’t the first to feel its bone-crushing power.

The man pressed his boot down harder, temporarily blocking off Marshall’s windpipe.

“Stop it!” Alex screamed from above. “You’re killing him!”

The man looked up and guffawed at the girl above him dangling like a worm on a hook. “Killing him?” the man asked with a crooked smile. “Nah. We just havin’ a li’l fun. That’s all.” The foot gave from Marshall’s throat just as the world was beginning to turn black. Through spots and stars, his vision slowly began to return.

The man turned his head back down toward his victim on the ground. “But I guess you’re right, little lady,” he said. “This really isn’t the time to be playing games. This pretty boy needs help.” With that, the man reached behind his back and retrieved a round, rusty object that instantly chilled the sweat dripping from Marshall’s brow.

A circular saw blade.

“It was you,” Marshall whimpered.

The man shrugged and moved his foot from Marshall’s neck to his forearm just above the fungal hand. With his hand securely pinned to the ground, Marshall squeezed his eyes shut and heard the man say, “Now don’t move, you hear?”

A second later, Marshall heard an airy
whir
buzz by his ear. A flash of sharp pain ignited his wrist, as sudden and quick as a spark of static electricity. And then it was gone, and everything below his forearm went completely numb. He thought he could still feel the rest of his arm, but it was strange. Different.

It felt lighter
.

“There.” The man crossed his arms at his chest in triumph. “Good as new.”

Marshall knew what he would see when he unclenched his eyes. Regardless, that did not stifle the surprise of seeing a blood-spurting stump where his hand had once been. Though shock was temporarily sparing him from the intense pain that was sure to arrive at any moment, the gruesome image of his own severed limb was horrific enough on its own. He could see his sliced bone protruding from the bloody stub, the streak of white so bright against the arterial blood that it almost seemed to glow.

And yet, Marshall did not feel the slightest compulsion to scream. In a churning ocean of dizziness and shock, a soothing wave of relief immersed him like a warm bath. Removing his hand had been like extracting a tick or a leech from flesh—you’d let someone crush a burning cigarette into your leg in order to get it off, wouldn’t you?

“I don’t care, just get it off!” you’d shout. “Just get it off! Get it off!”

And now it was off.

Marshall’s eyes drifted from his oozing stump to the redneck surgeon who had performed the operation.

“Thank you,” he muttered, the corners of his mouth pulling up in a perverted smile.

The man threw his head back, releasing a loud, excited hoot. “My pleasure, boy!”

Above, Alex had gone comatose, staring straight ahead while a constant tremor vibrated her body.

It was the last thing Marshall saw before he lapsed into darkness.

The last sound he heard was the man’s laugher echoing throughout the towering evergreens.

Leigh had been so lost in her own thoughts that she hadn’t noticed how slow the patter of the rain had become until Sam said, “You hear that? It’s finally letting up.”

Looking out into the damp trees and undergrowth, she could see that Sam was correct. The rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle and the clouds above were breaking apart.

“I guess we should go tell Rob and Eliza,” she said before her mouth opened in a jaw-stretching yawn. “Now we can get back to the nice, warm van. After the day we’ve had, I could use a nap.”

Just as Leigh grabbed each armrest of the rocking chair and prepared to push herself up, Sam placed a hand on hers.

“Wait,” he said.

“What?”

Sam glanced away, his cheeks flushing. “I wanted to ask you something.”

Leigh smiled, amused by his timidity. “”Okay, shoot.”

His foot rolled a twig back and forth across the ripples of the porch’s old wood. “I, uh, noticed all your friends are dating each other. But why didn’t your, um…boyfriend…come with you on your trip?”

“Well, I think the answer would be pretty obvious,” Leigh said with a little laugh. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Really?” The shock in Sam’s voice sounded sincere. “I find that hard to believe.”

“I guess that’s because you don’t really know me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Leigh hesitated when she realized what she was about to say had never been shared with anyone since she began college. Not even Alex knew the part of Leigh’s past that she was about to reveal. This, of course, raised the question, “Why share it with
this
guy?” Maybe it was because of the indescribable connection to him she had felt the moment he took a seat beside her in the van. Maybe it was because of the way her usual defense mechanisms, pessimism and cynicism, had failed to diminish her attraction to him. They had never failed her before.

Whatever the reason, it presented the perfect opportunity to put her therapist’s theories to the test. If fear was really just “false events appearing real,” then maybe it was time to embrace her counselor’s alternative acronym:

Face Everything And Rejoice.

Besides, a near-perfect stranger was just as good a candidate as she was ever going to get. At least she knew Sam went to a different school, so there was no chance of him spreading rumors around her campus.

“I haven’t been in a relationship since high school.” Leigh blurted out the fact before she could talk herself out of it. Sam nodded, seemingly unimpressed, but that came as no surprise. That had been the easy part.

“That’s cool,” Sam said, shrugging. “I know a bunch of people like that. I mean, just because you’re in college doesn’t guarantee you’ll find Mr. or Ms. Right sitting next to you in class.” It was hard not to notice the authenticity in Sam’s voice. “Besides, most college kids are animals. I don’t care what school you go to.”

Leigh released a long sigh. “Yeah, that’s definitely true. And it sure would make a great excuse.”

Sam’s eyebrows rose. “But?”

The moment of truth had arrived.

“But in my case, that’s not the truth. That last relationship I mentioned, the one in high school…” Leigh inhaled a deep breath. “It was with one of my teachers.”

She threw her hands up as if to say, “What can you do?” But she knew the gesture must have looked as artificial as it felt, doing nothing to convince Sam that it was no big deal.

Sam’s reaction, however, was difficult to judge, his expression one of neither repulsion nor support. When he spoke, it was a single simple word.

“Huh.”

Well, it was out. But the load that Leigh had hoped would be instantly lifted with these spoken words had yet to slide off her shoulders: there was still more to confess.

“He was my civics teacher, Mr. Hudson. Jerry. He didn’t molest me or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. I was eighteen and he was only twenty-eight. I won’t tell you how it started—it’s not important. What does matter is that people found out. My friends, my mom. Christ, by the end the entire town knew. But the first to know was my older brother, Dennis.”

She paused for Sam to comment, but he remained silent, listening.

“Dennis had graduated two years before me but stayed in our town to work and raise money for college. Our father died when we were kids, and my mom wanted to pay for his education, but Dennis insisted he’d pay his own way. Said she’d struggled enough raising us on her own, so now he’d take care of himself. Anyway, when Dennis found out about what was going on, he drove straight from his job at the power company to the high school, saw Jerry walking to his car, and attacked him.”

“Whoa.”

Leigh nodded her head, staring into the trees. “As you can imagine, it really hit the fan after that. When Dennis was questioned after his arrest, he told the authorities everything. But since I’d been of legal age, the court dismissed the case.”

Sam coughed and cleared his throat. “He must have lost his job, though.”

“Of course,” Leigh said, finding she needed to take a breath before her next sentence. “But so did Dennis. And to this day he still hasn’t applied for school. My mom ended up moving away, too. She couldn’t stay with all the shame hanging over our family’s head. She lives in upstate New York now.”

Leigh ran a finger along the bottom of her eye to discard the unshed tears that were threatening to leak out. After saying it out loud and hearing the horrible story with her own ears, she began to realize how artificial her own self-assurance really was. She wasn’t a loner because of her priorities or being misunderstood.

She was just fucked up.

“So,” she said, shaking her head clear of those memories, “bookworm or not, that is why I do not have a boyfriend.” She then turned to Sam and forced a smile. “The end.”

Sam shook his head. “Wow. Well, hey. Ask a question, get an answer, right?”

Leigh lifted her gaze from her shoes to see Sam’s expression was one of total bafflement. For reasons she didn’t understand, his raised eyebrows and half-mouthed smile initiated a sneak attack of boisterous laughter to erupt from her mouth.

Even when she turned away, she could still see Sam staring at her in disbelief from the corner of her eye.

“What’s so funny?” he said, now chuckling himself.

She threw her hands up. “Not a thing. Or hell, maybe all of it is.” Upon saying the words, Leigh realized they may have held more truth than she intended. The story of her past had never come close to conjuring a humorous response, but Sam’s company had changed something.

Indeed, it was history that could never be changed, but it was not her present. A rainy afternoon alone with an attractive and kind-hearted guy—that was the here and now. Maybe that didn’t completely justify turning her sob story into a laugh fest…

The hell with it
.

Sometimes laughing was the only thing you could do. You just need to find somebody to laugh with.

Again, Leigh traced the side of her finger along the bottom of her eye, mentally addressing how quickly and drastically the reason for her tears had changed. Her vision cleared, she lowered her hand just in time to spot a blur of movement in the trees beyond Sam’s shoulder.

Sam saw her smile fall away and asked, “What is it?”

“I think I just saw something in the woods.”

“Like an animal, you mean?”

Leigh squinted, looking into the thick brush but couldn’t make out the shape she’d just spotted moving between the ferns and thorn bushes. “Maybe,” she muttered, getting up from her chair and approaching the porch’s railing. “But I’m not sure. It could’ve been a person.”