🎧 Chapter Thirteen | The Most Dangerous Person on Earth

What you need to know:

Rick forced a high risk medical treatment on Josephine over the child’s protests and without express parental consent. Driving back to Portland to hunt Rick down, Jennifer has been pushed to the edge of her patience. What will happen when she finds him?

Chapter Thirteen

The Most Dangerous Person on Earth

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No. 14 Untitled by Josephine Lauck

For sixty-five dollars a day to include unlimited mileage, I’m given the key to a Chrysler LeBaron. Taking it, I race through the lot, find my car, speed out of Tacoma and onto the packed interstate.

Before me, the setting sun throws fiery red, pink and golden light against the undersides of the high clouds. Traffic inches along.

My cell, plugged into the cigarette lighter, vibrates in the cupholder.

I hit the speaker button. 

“What the hell happened?” Steve asks. Through the phone it sounds as if Steve is on the move, too. The bustling noise of what must be Portland International. “Boo was fine when I dropped her off.”

“I have no idea,” I say to the windshield of the rental that smells like rotten milk overlaid with pine air-freshener. “I’ve called his school. I’ve called the house. I’ve called his phone. He won’t answer. Fran saw him, briefly, when she went over to help out but he bolted away on his bike.”

“Where?”

“To work, I guess. He told Fran he was running late.”

A long moment of pause. “Shit. Shit. Double shit,” Steve finally says. “We would have been better off leaving her with Spencer.”

“That wasn’t an option. He’s at camp.”

“Fine. We’d been better off leaving her alone.”

“That’s against the law.”

“I know. I know,” he says. “I’m making a point here.” 

It’s likely not the best idea to remind Steve how he said, “…at least he’s trying. That’s something.”

“I’m headed back to Portland, now,” I say instead.

“Why?”

“Because.”

“You have to finish your term.”

I strangle the steering wheel with my hands. “It’s just something I have to do. I need to see Rick. I need to see Jo, too.”

Ahead, the flashing lights of police cruisers. An ambulance. Two cars on the side of the road.

“Where are you?” Steve asks. 

“Coming into Centralia,” I say. “But there’s a wreck.”

“There’s always a wreck there,” he says.

I check my blind spot, change lanes, pass the crumpled cars and the now car-less passengers who stand talking to highway patrolmen while scratching their heads.

“How could she have gotten sick so fast?” Steve says, the airport sounds on his side of the call replaced by the ding of an elevator.

“I don’t think we should talk about this,” I say, speeding to seventy again. “I don’t think I’m in a good place right now.”

“What does that mean?”

“She told him no.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Look, when you get Jo, have her call me. I need to hear her voice.”

“Okay,” he says, hesitant now.

“And bring Fran a bottle of wine. She lost a whole day of writing. Tell her we’re sorry for this inconvenience.”

“You’re kind of bossy,” Steve says. “How about ‘please’.”

I clear my throat of what I really want to say which wouldn’t be very nice. “Please,” I say.

Through Steve’s phone comes the sound of a car door opening, closing, then a beep-beep-beep.

“Tell me one thing,” Steve says. “Did he intend to hurt Josephine? Is that what you’re saying?”

I push the rental to seventy-five, and still the bulk of the traffic passes me, that whoosh of air and that rattle of tiny rocks against the windshield. Everyone in a hurry. Go. Go. Go.

“Jen?” Steve asks. “You still there?”

“Yeah,” I say.

The last of the sunset drains from the sky that’s now a steel gray.

“Okay,” Steve finally says. “I’ll have Jo call you.”

“Thank you,” I say, hit the off button.

It is deep night when I pull the LeBaron in front of our house. If the kids were with me, one of them would call out, “Home again, home again, jiggety jig.” But Jo’s with Steve and Spencer’s at the last day of his Lego Robotics camp.

I turn off the engine and sit in the ticking quiet of the car. In my body though is a sense of motion, a sense of speed.

I look at the house where the night bugs fly at the porch light, bounce off, and fly at it again. They are manic to reach the light and I get it. I’ve been trying to get the light myself for a long time: Yoga, meditation, retreats, anger therapy, Gestalt therapy, acupuncture, herbs, exercise therapy, and self-help book after self-help book. All this “personal work” has only helped feed a delusion that I have things figured out. I actually believe, as I sit in that car with the key fisted in my hand, that Rick is the issue here. He’s screwed up. He’s neurotic. He’s the one to blame, I’m telling myself.

A shadow of movement from inside the house catches my attention and I look hard at the front windows. He’s home. Of course he’s home. He’s probably been screening all my calls, delighted by my frantic messages. The bully gets what he wants. Again.

I study the key in my hand, the plastic tag from Dollar Rental with a serial number and the make of the car written in someone’s looping script.

When talking to Jo again, this time while she was with Steve, we went through what had happened in those minutes between her having a tummy ache and throwing up.

“I said no,” she said.

“How many times?” I asked her.

“Lots,” she said.

“Can you be more precise? Four? Ten?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

Because I remember saying no, too, Jo, I could have said but only years and years later. At that time, I didn’t carry a coherent of a memory in the logical part of my brain. I asked because my body did have the count though. My body had long been keeping the score.

I push open the car door, step out and shove the key into my front pocket. The air here is startlingly hot. Balmy, too, as if it might rain soon. Thunder rumbles from the west.

Around the back of the car, across the sidewalk, I take the steps two at a time and open the front door. I step into the entry and then around the dark wood screen.

There he is in a leather chair, hands on the armrests. He wears shorts, a camp shirt, and Birkenstocks.

“You’re back,” he says, voice flat. That hooded droop of his eyes. That non-expression on his face. Robotic. Empty. I stick needles in people to feel something, he told me and Maxine.

“Yes. I’m back,” I say and my voice sounds strange to me. Deep, like a man. I shift my jaw side to side, a rising feeling of rage within, a fire I’ve banked for such a long time. “I think it’s best we talk outside.”

For a moment, he looks confused. A furrow works along his wide forehead.

“Come on,” I say.

I turn, walk out the open door, jog down the steps. At the sidewalk, under the branches of the horse chestnut tree, I stand and wait. There, at the gnarled base, someone affixed a miniature door and two tiny hinges. “It’s a door for the fairies,” Rick told Jo when we first moved into this house. Of course she was delighted, playing along with his leaving candy and notes. Those games stopped after a while though. Now we played this game.

No. 15 Untitled by Josephine Lauck

The thunder rumbles over head, closer now.

I look up at our front door, still open wide. Bugs fly inside, then out, then in again.

At last, Rick steps into the doorway and shades his eyes.

“Here,” I say from under the tree.

Rick crosses the porch and jogs down the steps, the flap flap of his sandals along the walkway. At last he stops before me, his face shadowed. “What’s up?” he asks, nonchalant. It’s pretty remarkable how fast he changes from his old to his new self. Impressive actually. I feel a momentary sorrow for him, for his suffering that must be intense. No one wants to be the way he’s fashioned himself. There’s no peace or happiness in such a person. In this more reasoned state, I am about to say he needs to leave. That it’s over. But then my own possession overtakes me. I said no. I said no, playing in my head.  

“It’s because you’re in the basement? Right?” I ask him.

“I’m not following…”

“That’s why you messed with Jo today? Why you stuck those seeds on her ears?”

He opens his hands in that gesture of a reasonable guy. “I was trying to help…”

“You told me those seeds are for adults only,” I say, cutting him off. “You specifically said that kids, all kids, are too sensitive.”

He opens his mouth, about to say something, but then closes it again. Looks past me into the dark, thinking. Then he looks at me again. “Steve dropped her off before I had eaten breakfast,” he says, adjusting his glasses. “I had low blood sugar. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“So now it’s Steve’s fault?”

“I forgot she was coming.”

“You forgot?”

 “I only wanted to help…” he starts but I shove both hands into his chest.

Rick trips back, stumbles on the edge of the uneven sidewalk but then catches himself. Under the glow of a streetlight now, he looks at me, surprised. 

“She needed help,” Rick says.

“She said no,” I said push him again—harder this time.

Rick stumbles back several steps.

“I had to work…” he says.

And, “I was late…”

And, “The chain on my bike broke…”

For every excuse he makes, I push him. Again and again.

Somewhere in all this, Rick lowers his center of gravity. He no longer offers his litany of excuses, but rather takes each shove, backing up a few steps each time.

They say that violence begets violence, and I understand now. The more I shove him, the further I get him from our house, the more I want to shove him. Inside, a rising a black rage that desires to do more to him. To punch him. To draw blood.

“Push back,” I hear myself say. “Hit me. Come on, fight back.”

Rick continues to stay loose though, to stutter steps backwards while I advance.

Finally, we reach the corner of our block. Late-night cars drive past in both directions, the headlights sliding along the road, the faces of the passengers and drivers looking out at us and then ahead again.

I’m out of breath and lightheaded. A seizing in my chest.

Rick, realizing it’s over…or nearly so…stands tall again, tugs at the flaps of his shirt, smooths himself out.

Coming to my senses, I back away from him and look around. I cannot catch my breath. I feel like I might fall down. There, a set of concrete steps that lead to the porch of a darkened apartment building. I drop to sit. I gasp for air.

“She’s just a little girl,” I hear myself say. “She’s just a little girl.” And I’m crying in a way I haven’t since I was child. It’s the kind of sadness you feel when your whole world has come to an end. My head in my hands.

Movement next to me. Someone sitting near. The weight of an arm around my shoulders. “It’s okay,” Rick says. “It’s okay.”

It’s like being shocked. His proximity. His touch.

I shove his arm off me and scramble to stand. “Don’t touch me,” I say. “Don’t you ever touch me again.”

Next:

Chapter Fourteen: The Moment of Impact

Jennifer’s attack of Rick reverberates out like ripples on the surface of a clear lake, sending her into a spiral of confusion over her reaction, as well as a desire to put as much distance between herself and Rick as possible. After a book reading, she’s driving Fran home just before sunset when an oncoming car runs a light…once more everything is about to change.