Stranger in the Lake(68)
No answer. His friends were gone. Jax was alone.
The door handle was like water in his fingers. He couldn’t get a solid grip. After three tries he somehow managed, shoving open the door and sliding out onto the dirt. He caught his balance, then turned in a slow circle, trying to get his bearings—hard to do when the world was spinning. He rubbed his eyes, searched for movement in the dark shadows. It was like looking through a dark, wispy fog.
A trailer park. He was standing in the middle of a dark and grubby trailer park, one he didn’t recognize. Then again, why would he? He wasn’t friends with anyone who lived in one, didn’t run with that kind of crowd. The trailer-park kids weren’t exactly college-bound.
He took in the square and stubby shapes, dozens and dozens of them lined up like boxy shadows, all dark but one, pushed up against the woods at the far end. That one was lit up like a fairground ride. Colorful Christmas lights, strung across the roof and around every window. A lava-red glow coming from underneath the cinder-block risers. Jax leaned forward on his toes and squinted. Was that a hot tub?
“Hey, Paul. Micah.” He slurred their names into the nighttime sky, his voice bouncing around the hills. “Get your sorry asses out here!”
A sleepy voice shouted from the darkness behind him. “Shut the hell up!”
What time was it?
He stuck his head through the driver’s window, but the car was dark. The engine was off, the dash black. He reached for the keys and swiped air. Excellent. Now what? He couldn’t walk home. He had no idea which way to go or how far. And it wasn’t like he could call a taxi in this sorry mountain town.
So Jax did the only thing his tequila-saturated brain could think of. He laid on the horn. One by one, lights popped on all around him, the dark shapes coming to life. Somewhere to his right, a baby started crying. He leaned on the horn again, a long series of beeps that echoed through the hills.
Somewhere around the fifth or sixth time, a door swung open and a woman tumbled out, shooting across the dirt in a tank top and red bikini underwear. Her bare legs were scary skinny and her hair wild, like she’d been sleeping in a wind tunnel. She marched right up to him and smacked him on the chest.
“Goddamn it all to hell, you woke up the baby. Do you know how hard that kid is to get to sleep, and now your caterwaulin’ woke him up. Are you going to come in there and put him back down? Because I sure as hell ain’t. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Where to start? With his dead mom? With his missing friends? With this woman’s shouting that was only making her kid cry harder?
“I’m so wasted.” He meant it as something like an apology, but this woman just rolled her eyes.
“I got a nose. I could smell you from ten miles away.”
Behind her, a girl appeared in the doorway. She was six, maybe seven, and cradling the wailing baby to her chest. She had that same crazy hair as the lady in front of him, those same skinny legs sticking out from a tattered nightgown. “Mama, I think he’s hungry.”
The woman ignored her daughter, sizing him up instead. “Tequila?”
“Jose Cuervo.” His tongue stumbled around the words, mushing them up and sticking the syllables together: “Hosaycuervo.”
“Where?”
“Where what?”
“Where’s the tequila? It’s the least you can do for waking the baby.”
It was then Jax felt a pang. Something wasn’t right with this woman. Her pupils were the size of dimes, the skin on her arms all scabbed up. Track marks or scratches or both. He looked beyond her to the girl, standing on the pile of cinder blocks that served as steps. The baby cried and cried.
“Mama, he needs a bottle but there ain’t one.”
“Shut up, Charlie. Get your butt back inside.”
What killed Jax the most was that the little girl didn’t look surprised. She didn’t look sad or disappointed. She just looked...accustomed. This jittery-ass woman angling for Jax’s booze was her mother. This was their life. The girl just stood there, clutching her wailing baby brother against her chest, blinking at him with those Bambi eyes, willing her crack-whore mother to come inside and feed her baby brother. Jesus, somebody call child services or something.
By now the woman was digging through his car, throwing doors open and rooting around on the floorboards, her skinny ass in the air while her baby howled. She emerged with the bottle of tequila—now empty. She grimaced and flung it to the dirt.
“You got more, right?”
Was this a dream? Was this woman really begging him for booze while her kids went hungry?
He stared at the lady and her kids on the cinder-block steps, and he wondered which was worse: losing the mother who glued your family together or growing up with a mother like this one. The answer came to him instantly, along with a sour wave of tequila that landed on the dirt by his feet.
These kids. These poor, miserable kids had it so much worse than Jax ever could.
And this was how Jax knew he couldn’t be saved, why a hundred baptisms by Pamela’s crazy pastor into the waters of Lake Crosby couldn’t save his black and evil soul—because looking at that scraggly girl and her wailing baby brother made him want nothing more than that second bottle of tequila.
30
The good thing about living in a house of glass in the woods is that you know when someone’s coming. You hear the whir of a motor as they steer around a curve in the drive, murmured voices carried on the wind, the way the birds and chipmunks go still and quiet. It gives you just enough time to pat down your hair and slap on a smile before they step up to a door or a window.