Phoenix (Kindle Single) (3 page)

“How about I burn her with a cigarette?” he asks, his voice warped with sarcasm. “Would that make you happy?”

“Use a needle from my sewing box,” Rachel instructs. “But sterilize it with some rubbing alcohol first. She’s never had a tetanus shot.”

Ted says, “I can’t believe that you’re serious.”

“This has gone on long enough,” she says. She knows she sounds crazy. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe this was the toxoplasmosis, an infection in her brain talking, but she knows she’s serious.

When their insurance settlement for the fire had failed to come through in a speedy fashion, by then the fire marshal was calling it arson. Their lab tests had found a residue in the cat’s fur. Some incendiary chemical agent had kept Belinda Carlisle aflame during her panicked, agonizing final flight. It looked fishier yet that a few weeks before the fire Rachel had doubled their homeowners coverage. Even with a baby clamped to one breast, she hadn’t hesitated to lawyer up.

On the phone Sunday night, Rachel says she’s not bluffing. Either Ted makes their daughter emit some words, some
sound
, or they’ll have this battle in family court. It seems like a long time, but Ted responds.

His voice pointed elsewhere, he says, “April, honey. Do you remember what a flu shot is?” He says, “Do you remember when you had to get a shot so you could go play at Easter camp?” Silence answers. Rachel shuts her eyes in order to hear more. All she can detect is the hum of the fluorescent bulb in the bedside lamp. She stands up from the bed to shut off the air conditioner, but before she takes a step, Ted’s voice is back.

“Can you get Daddy the sewing basket?” Nothing seems to happen, but now his voice comes full into Rachel’s ear. “Are you happy? Does this make you happy?” His footsteps sound in the hallway. “I’m going to the bathroom.” His delivery is singsong, like a lullaby. “I’m getting the rubbing alcohol to torture our daughter.” He sings, “Rach, you can stop this at any time.”

But Rachel knows this isn’t true. Nobody can stop anything. The people will always be humping next door. The burning cat will always be rocketing like a comet around every house in which they ever live. Nothing will ever be resolved. Again, it crosses her mind that Ted might be tormenting her. April is upstairs in her room or playing in the backyard, and he’s only pretending she’s there. That’s easier to swallow than the idea that her own child despises her.

“You don’t understand,” Rachel tells the phone. “I need you to hurt her to prove she’s alive.” She demands, “Hurt her as proof of how much you don’t hate me.”

Before the TV can sell another thousand diamond wristwatches, April screams.

Not a beat later, Ted asks, “Rach?” Breathless. The scream echoing in her head. It would echo in her head forever. A caterwauling. The shriek of Belinda Carlisle. It’s the same squeal April had made when she was born.

“You did it,” she says.

Ted replies, “You screamed.”

It wasn’t Rachel’s scream or April’s. It was still another sex noise from the next room. It’s another stalemate. The bag will always be half full. Ted will always be cheating.

Rachel asks him to put April on the phone. “Make sure she’s got the phone to her ear,” Rachel says, “and then I want you to leave the room.”

“Your father doesn’t understand.” Into the phone, Rachel says, “He owed more on that house than it was worth. Someone had to make the ugly choices.”

She explains to her daughter how the only problem with marrying a spineless, lazy, stupid man is that you could be stuck with him for the rest of your life. “I had to do something,” Rachel says. “I didn’t want you born dead
and
blind.”

It doesn’t matter who’s listening, Ted or April. It’s another mess that Rachel needs to clean up. She describes how she’d combed hairspray into the cat’s fur, simple cheap hairspray, every day for weeks. She knew it was using the fireplace as a toilet, and she hoped the pilot light would be enough. Rachel overfed the cat so it would need to defecate more often. She crossed her fingers that an increase in intestinal gas might do the trick. She was no sadist. On the contrary, she didn’t want Belinda Carlisle to suffer. Rachel had made certain the smoke detectors had fresh batteries, and she’d waited.

“Your father,” she begins. “He thinks that if the dishes and the toilet are black to begin with, they never get dirty.”

Their last night in Ted’s house, Rachel had stepped into the living room. She’d rushed inside from the cold. She’d intentionally turned down the thermostat, hoping to make the pilot light more attractive. To set her trap, she’d buried tuna fish in the crushed gravel. That night, she’d walked into the dark room, into the shadow cast by the Christmas tree, and seen two yellow eyes blinking at her from the fireplace. A little drunk, she’d said, “I’m sorry.”

On the phone in Orlando, very drunk, she says, “I wasn’t sorry.”

Rachel had told the cat goodbye, and she’d flipped the switch. The
click-click-click,
like the tapping of a white cane. The banshee scream. Flames raced up the living room curtains. Flames raced up the stairs. In the end, the insurance company couldn’t prove definitively that any chemical residue wasn’t the scorched remains of dry-cleaning plastic.

Saying this, she senses that April has become a stranger. Someone separate who must be respected and deserves to know the truth. April has split away to become another person. “Your daddy stalling is the reason why you’ll never see a sunset.”

The silence could’ve been anyone or no one. If it’s April, she won’t understand, not until she’s older.

Rachel says, “I only chose your father because he’s weak. I married him because I knew I could push him around.” She says that the problem with passive people is that they force you to take action. After that, they hate you for it. They never forgive you. Only then, over the phone, clear and unmistakable, does Rachel hear Ted begin to weep. It’s nothing she hasn’t heard before, but this time his sobs build until, like blasts from a whistle, a child screams. Like a smoke alarm, a high-pitched frantic child’s shriek erupts, sirening from the telephone.

Rachel’s goading has worked. He coerced, controlled, and steered
her
into hurting something innocent; now they’re even.

With her child’s screams and her husband’s weeping still loud in her ears, Rachel gazes at a gigantic revolving diamond, entranced, trying to divine the new future as she whispers, “Goodnight.”

Byliner
commissions and publishes original stories written to be read in two hours or less. These “e-short” stories are available on phone, tablet, or computer as part of the Byliner subscription service, and can also be purchased individually through all the major digital bookstores. Bestselling Byliner titles include Amy Tan’s
Rules for Virgins
, Margaret Atwood’s
Positron
, Jon Krakauer’s
Three Cups of Deceit
, Ann Patchett’s
The Getaway Car
, Nick Hornby’s
Everyone’s Reading Bastard
, and Buzz Bissinger’s
After Friday Night Lights
. On
Byliner.com
, readers get personalized access to an unmatched library of more than 20,000 fiction and nonfiction stories by the world’s best writers, allowing them to easily find, read, save, and share new and classic stories by their favorite authors.

Read an excerpt at Byliner.com

In the first installment of Byliner’s serial
Positron
, Margaret Atwood, one of the most prophetic authors of our time, delivers a fictional tale of sexual obsession that is equal parts
Tom Jones
and
Brave New World
. A hilarious yet harrowing story that lays bare the very real dangers of trading liberty for safety,
I’m Starved for You
evokes the irrepressibility of human appetite and asks just how far a man and a woman are willing to go to get what they’re truly hungry for.

Read an excerpt at Byliner.com

Newspaper columnist Elaine Harris has always written about her life with husband Charlie. Her readers count on full disclosure from her, but what no one—especially Charlie—anticipates, only a week after the couple decide to divorce, is the speed with which she crucifies him in print. Only a storyteller like Hornby—who’s given us so many unforgettable novels of comedy and heartbreak (
High Fidelity, About a Boy, Juliet, Naked
)—could conceive of an average guy trying to survive an ex’s wrath gone viral. His latest rollicking account of love’s fallout should be instructive: Sometimes no one wins. Sorry, Charlie.

Read an excerpt at Byliner.com

A hero whose favorite weapon is a hammer clearly has issues. Meet Joe, an ass-kicking and psychologically tormented guardian angel who rescues others but refuses to save himself. A former Marine and ex–FBI agent, he has seen one too many crime scenes and known too much trauma. Solitary and haunted, Joe prefers to be invisible, making his living rescuing young girls from the deadly clutches of the sex trade. But when a high-ranking New York politician hires him to extricate his teenage daughter from a Manhattan brothel, he uncovers a web of corruption that even he may not be able to unravel. In this shocking and suspenseful new novella, Ames—novelist, essayist, and creator of the HBO series
Bored to Death
—goes darker than noir.