Joe (19 page)

Chapter
Thirty-One

Joe,
nine years ago

She
was only twelve years old when it happened, and for the four days prior to the
event, she had been involuntarily shaking, her muscles seizing up and seeming
to vibrate on their own accord. It was an awful, exhausting feeling. Her heart
would beat so fast that her breath would go short and seemingly pass through
her without providing the oxygen her body needed. She kept reminding herself to
take deep breaths, but even these were unfruitful and gave her a surreal
feeling of lightheadedness. At night, her head would be pounding, and sleep
would come late and end early. She lost nearly five pounds in those four days.
She had no appetite and could not eat.

This time the sketch was in color,
because when the need to compose it came over her she happened to be in her
room reading. On the desk in the corner had been a pack of colored pencils. The
two colors that she used mostly ended up being red and orange. Awful, annoying
colors, they were. Hard on the eyes, she learned. Hard on the eyes.

She was in the middle of turning the
page of the book she was reading when the feeling came over her, and her first
thought was
oh no.
That continued being her thought as she set the book
aside, stood up from the bed, and made her way over to the desk in the corner,
where those colored pencils were waiting for her. She sat down and up-ended the
box. The ten pencils slid out in a neat, colorful row.

Oh no. Oh no. Oh—

She selected the black colored pencil
first, her itching and throbbing left hand making the choice without a
conscious command from her brain. Her free hand was clenched into a hard fist.
Both hands were clammy, but they were steady. Especially her left hand.

Oh no, no, no, no—

Her right hand retrieved a blank piece
of paper from the desk drawer and set it atop the desk. It returned to her lap,
once again folding itself into a hard fist. The black pencil in her left hand
set to work on the paper, gliding over the page so smoothly that, despite the
lines that were appearing on the white paper below it, it never really seemed
to touch the sheet. She looked away. This wasn’t going to be good. No, it was
never
good.
Just breathe. Just breathe. Oh no no no. Just—

Only five minutes had gone by when her
left hand halted, the itching and throbbing sensations receding as suddenly as
they had come, but it felt to Joe like every second was endless, reluctant to
yield to the next. Throughout it, her left hand had swapped the black colored
pencil for other colors. Joe noticed that the red and the orange pencils were
being selected a lot.

When her hand stopped she squeezed her
eyes closed, crushing out salty tears that she hadn’t realized had been waiting
there. They rolled down her pale cheeks and met at the tip of her chin, falling
to the no-longer white sheet of paper below her bent head. It had been three
years since she had last drawn the future, and she had hoped that it wouldn’t
happen again. Dealing with the small flashes of foresight that sent images
through her head had become second nature to her at this point, like when her
mother left the window in the car down right before a heavy rain. She only
drew
the future when something big and bad was coming. Something
really
big
and bad, like the stranger at the daycare, and the fire at her best friend’s
house down the street three years ago. Both times people had died as a result
of her failure. And now…

Just don’t look at it. Just crumple it
up right now and throw it away. Better yet, rip it into tiny pieces and flush
them down the toilet. That’s where shit you don’t need belongs. Just
don’t
look at it.

Sure, she could do that, but that
wouldn’t stop whatever was depicted on the paper from coming true. That
wouldn’t stop her from worrying over what bad thing was coming. That wouldn’t
help anyone, not even her.

Joe looked down.

Oh…
no
.

It was her mother and father. There was
no mistaking that. Both of their beautiful faces were turned toward her
clairvoyant camera, orange and red light brightening the scene to high noon,
though outside the window behind her parents’ bed the darkness said it was
sometime during the night. Yes, the sketch was set in her parents’ bedroom, at
night, and Joe’s throat closed up as she took it all in.

Just had to look, didn’t you? Just
had
to look.

Her mother was strapped to the bed with what
looked like duct tape. Her manicured hands were held to bed posts with it, her
feet free and seemingly in mid-kick. Her pearl-colored silk nightgown was up
above her knees

(where a proper lady’s skirt should
never be)

and her face was twisted in agony, her
eyes wide and terrified, her mouth hanging open in a silent scream. Joe
couldn’t see it, nor did she realize it, but looking down at the sketch, the
expression on her face matched the expression on her mother’s face almost
identically. The resemblance between the two of them was
almost
visible.

Her father was further away from the
camera, standing on the opposite side of the bed, and staring down at his wife
whom he must have taped to the post. The look on his face was the single most
terrifying expression young Joe had ever seen. It was all hate and anger and
justified satisfaction. A slanted smile played on his lips. That orange and red
painted his face. If demons truly existed, Joe thought that this is what they
might look like. His eyes were locked on her mother. A red can of what Joe
figured had to be gasoline hung from one of his hands. A silver lighter was
clutched in the other.

In the sketch, her mother was on fire.
And in the awful sketch, it was obvious who had set it.

Oh no.

You got that right.
Oh no.

Joe took her earlier advice then, and
tore the paper into tiny pieces and flushed those poisonous things down the
toilet. Where

(shit you don’t need belongs)

no one but the rats in the sewers would
ever see it. 

Now what?

It was a big question for such a young
girl, but she entertained it nonetheless. What other choice did she have? She
couldn’t just

(let it burn)

let it happen. She hadn’t even realized
things with her parents weren’t well. Well, that wasn’t precisely true. There
was Tom, wasn’t there. Yes, there was Tom.

Her father spent a good deal of time at
work. He was an oral surgeon with his own practice, and a man who enjoyed going
out for drinks with his pretty, young dental assistants after the work day was
through. This wasn’t what he told his wife, of course, because in his own
strange way he loved her. Maybe, Joe would think years later as she replayed
the incident over in her head, maybe, he loved her just a little
too
much.
She was after all, quite beautiful. Her mother suspected something was going
between her husband and at least one of his assistants, but she never said
anything to him about it. She had Tom.

“He’s just a friend of mine,” she told
young Joe on the first occasion that Tom came by during the day, when her
father was at work.

The girl had only nodded at her mother,
not wanting to think about the way her mother said the word “friend”. A friend
was okay. A friend was just, well, a
friend,
right? Sure. Right. Kyle
and Kayla were Joe’s friends, and Kyle was a boy, so surely her mother could
have a male friend too. Surely.

To a jealous husband, the answer to
these questions was
No. Not right. Not right at all.
Joe didn’t know
just how
not right at all
it was. She was only twelve, after all. She
was only twelve.

Now the image on her twelve year-old
mind was that of her father setting her mother, who was duct taped to their
bed, on fire. How could this be? Better yet,
why?
Why would her father
do something like that? Wasn’t the fire that had taken her friend down the
street three years ago bad enough?

No, it will never stop. As long as you
have this gift, it will never stop. And when you get out into the big ole
world, baby, it’s just going to get worse. Evil is not just a thing of
fairytales. Evil is real and it walks among us. Evil is jealousy and hate and
fear and fire. Yes, evil is fire. You saw it in his eyes. The fire reflected
from those jealous, hateful eyes, and whether or not you want it to, it’s going
to happen. So,

What now? What are you going to do now?

Not eat, for one thing. No sleep,
either. And what would happen if she tried to tell someone? A police officer,
maybe. Well, then that officer would tell her parents. He would tell them and
her mother would be embarrassed and her father would convince the officer with
his white, straight smile and suit that there was nothing to worry about.

“She’s just strange, that girl. Big
imagination. We’ve had her looked at by all the quacks in town. She just a
little off her rocker.”

Yes, that’s what they would say. That’s what
they always said in whispers behind closed doors when their raven-haired,
strange-eyed daughter embarrassed them. And everyone believed them because,
yes, they had to admit, the girl was very strange. Telling someone was not an
option.

Then be ready. When it happens—and it
will
happen—she would just have to be ready. When the fireworks started, she
would feel it, just as she had at the daycare so many years ago and during the
fire down the street three years ago. All she had to do was get ready and wait.
It was all she
could
do.

The waiting was harder than the
planning. The waiting was making her shake and take useless, shallow breaths.
The waiting was costing her sleep and at night she would lay awake, waiting for
that unmistakable feeling to flood through her stomach. It was a rough four
days.

Her plan was a simple one, and she
gathered the necessities for it quickly. The fire extinguisher was the hardest
to obtain without her parents notice, but the frying pan and the blanket were
easy enough. She folded a thick blanket and placed it under her bed. Under that
she placed the iron frying pan. The fire extinguisher she got from the drug
store around the corner after school on her walk home the next day. It was a
small one, and her parents kept a bigger one in the house mounted to the
kitchen wall in case of an emergency. But if she took that, they would more
than likely notice its absence. This one fit right into Joe’s backpack, and she
read its usage instructions over and over until she’d memorized them. And she
waited.

On the fourth night, just before Joe
turned the lamp off in her room so that she could make an attempt at sleep, she
made herself recall the sketch she’d drawn. One detail of it had been
particularly important to her plan, and she learned then the foolishness of
destroying the paper before she had time to study it a little longer. No
matter, she knew that the side of the bed where her father had been standing
was the side of the room where the door was located. Her father’s back had been
to that door as he’d stood looking down at her mother with that awful look on
his face. That was good. That might make it easier.

Sleep did come on that fourth night,
easier than Joe would have expected. Whether this was because her body’s need
for rest had finally won, or because the Gods had a cruel sense of humor, she
never knew. Young Joe fell asleep without ever realizing she had done so. And
she had slept well. Until about two o’clock in the morning, she had slept well.

Joe awoke abruptly, ripped from that
dark, peaceful place where not even dreams were allowed. She sat up quickly in
her bed, her bedroom dark all around her. Throwing the covers off her sweaty
body she stood up, her bare feet sticking to the cold hardwood floor beneath
them. Her heartbeat buzzed in frantic, inconsistent, and rapid fury, as if
angry over the stress it had been under for the past four days. Her whole
twelve-year-old body shook involuntarily. Awful, awful feeling.

Just breathe. Just wait.

Then she heard her mother’s voice, shrill
and high and clear in the silence of the dark night.

“What are you doing? Stop that! Have you
lost your mind? Stop it!
Pleeease!”

Then her father’s.

“You must think I’m some kind of fool!
Is that what you think? You’re a dirty slut and you’ll get just what a dirty
slut deserves!”

For a moment, Joe found that she was
unable to move. The voices were those of her parents, but the tones were all
wrong. The voice that sounded like her mother’s was off somehow. The voice that
sounded like her father’s was…
broken
somehow, like the deep bellow of an
angry hound dog who has found himself caught in a nasty bear trap. Maybe if she
just crawled back under her covers and closed her eyes these imposter-parent
voices would go away. Maybe—

“What is that? Gasoline! What are you
going to do with that? Untie me! Untie me right now, goddam it!”

Her mother again. Then the sound of a
hard, cold slap. It made a
thwack!
sound that was so loud that Joe heard
it perfectly from down the hall in her dark bedroom. Then, her father’s broken
voice again.