Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(12)
She watches Chase, and eventually a stare seals between them. Her eyes are black slits that swallow light and give nothing back. Maybe he sees in her face some silent disapproval, some forbidding reminder of one of his ex-wives or Augustus, his chief of staff, who tells him not to come here.
The reporters like to splash his face across the newspapers walking out of strip clubs, heckling the ref and hurling popcorn at Trail Blazers games, speedboating along the Columbia with two women half his age wearing American flag bikinis. He doesn’t care.
But Augustus does. Augustus, with his buffalo head and highfalutin vocabulary, keeps imploring him—that’s the word he used, imploring, as in I implore you—to think about the next election, about the ammunition he is giving his opponents. But the next election seems a long way off. And besides, he ran as an independent, and independent is who he is, and who he is got him elected, thank you very much. “I’d rather be an open door,” he told Augustus. “I don’t hide my dirty business like all the rest of these crooks. And people appreciate that. Because my dirty isn’t that dirty. What you see is what you get. Nobody’s going to catch me taking bribes or cheating on my wife.”
“You aren’t married.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Just like I was saying, independent.”
He discovered Japanese food only a few years ago, and the chopsticks are still difficult for him to handle, but with some concentration he is able to grip them steadily, to bring the temaki and the gunkan and the norimaki to his mouth, relishing not just the strange spongy textures and sharp spices, but the beautiful woman beneath him—her skin so pure and hairless, so different from the hands that hover over her, tanned and calloused, dark hair curling up his knuckles.
“You are a sight,” he says and mashes a roll with his teeth.
The old woman plucks the koto, and the restaurant seems to move according to the music’s slow, steady rhythm—chopsticks and teacups rising and falling—as if strings connect them all, long dangling red strings the old woman tugs.
In his pocket, his BlackBerry vibrates. He considers letting the call go. That’s the worst thing about the job, the constant questions, the pestering, everyone wanting his attention, demanding something of him, a vote, a law, a promise, a repeal, a speech. But when he pulls out the phone, the caller ID reads Augustus Remington and he knows if he doesn’t answer, Augustus will simply call him back, over and over, until he answers.
He brings the phone to his ear and says, “Buffalo! Guess where I’m—”
“Be quiet. Just be quiet for a moment, please. Something has happened.”
Chapter 5
SLEEP USED TO come like a guillotine. Patrick would crawl into bed and pull the sheets up to his neck and in less than a minute the darkness would come crashing down. It always seemed like that, like it was coming from above, suddenly descending on him.
Now when he lies awake, when the shadows creeping across the ceiling begin to coalesce and fall toward him, he will startle, snap open his eyes, shake his head. It’s not that he doesn’t want to sleep—he is constantly exhausted and wants more than anything to feel rested again—it’s the dreams he can do without.
He is on the plane. Outside his window, clouds pearl and glimmer with lightning. He feels a hand on his wrist. He turns to the woman next to him and her mouth opens as if to tell him something. Instead a tongue falls out, a too-long tongue that rolls with her panting. Her breath smells like carrion. Her gums bleed as her teeth grow into points. Her eyes turn yellow as if lit by some sulfurous light. He looks past her, looks for help, only to discover that everyone on board is staring at him. Even the flight attendants, the pilots in the open door of the cockpit. They all begin to wail and rip off their clothes and move toward him with their claws greedily outstretched.
If not for these dreams, he wouldn’t want to wake up. He wouldn’t want to throw off the covers and stumble down the hall and crunch through a bowl of cereal and scrub his armpits under the hot spray of the shower and pull on the new jeans and polo his mom bought him at the mall especially for this day, his first day at Old Mountain High.
She is already gone, his mother, off to show a house. But on the counter, beneath his keys, she has left him a note. Good luck, it reads. I love you! Her handwriting reminds him of barbed wire. He crumples up the paper and tosses it in the garbage can on his way out the door.
His black Wrangler sits in the driveway. It is his first car, a gift bought thirdhand by his mother to help with the transition. “I know this isn’t easy,” she said when she dropped the keys in his palm. “And I want you to be happy. I hope this helps a little.” She tries. She really does. Saying “I love you,” every chance she gets. Asking if he wants to talk, if not to her, then somebody else?—she knows a therapist who could help. “No, thanks,” he tells her. “I’m not into that,” and when she asks what he means by that, he says, “Talking.”
The passenger-side headlight is cracked and gives off a weak, sputtery glow. Duct tape holds together sections of the soft top, which at high speeds flaps and whistles like a panicked gathering of birds. Wherever he parks he leaves behind puddles of oil and antifreeze dusted over with rust. Regardless of its disrepair, he kind of loves the Jeep.
Bits of quartz catch the sun and flash from the gravel driveway when he drives down it and turns onto the blacktop that will carry him the five miles to school. Here, along the shoulder, is where the news vans parked a month ago, the reporters huddled next to the mailbox, the cameras trained at the house like howitzers. They were waiting for him to come out, and when he didn’t, they eventually left. He did only one interview—and that was enough. He didn’t have anything to say. Everyone had died except for him. Not because he did anything special. But because he hid beneath a body and played dead. That wasn’t something to retell, relive—that was something to forget.