The Sound of Broken Ribs(9)

She dropped the smashed and crushed woman into a mass of black loam. The woman uttered a bubbly cry, like a baby trying to cry while it had spit-up in its mouth. Belinda said goodbye and walked back to the car.

She saw the neon yellow sneaker laying on its side in the middle of the road, but it didn’t register. She got into her Toyota and pulled away.

Where had she been heading before she’d been sidetracked? To her brother’s? Yes. Right. She would stay with him for a while. See if she couldn’t get her life back on track. If she looked at all this as a conscious decision, as her wanting to start over and not needing too, she might be able to leave Dan and his betrayal in the rearview mirror. Focusing on him and his abandonment of her would not help anyone.

She drove for another four miles on Highway 607 until she reached the Welcome to Bay’s End sign at the edge of town. She passed the wreckage of Madame Zorka’s cottage. Belinda recalled being a kid and having to sit in Madame Zorka’s waiting room/living room while her mother had her palm read for ten bucks a sitting. Mom finally wised up to what amounted to a glorified carnival fortuneteller and stopped going. Actually, Belinda seemed to remember being at the dinner table when Dad had finally put his foot down and forbade Mom from wasting another penny on the obvious con-woman.

Rumor had it a handful of teenagers had blown the place up with some gasoline and cow shit, or something like that. But all Belinda knew for sure was that there was not much left of the old building aside from some charred support beams, a blackened toilet, and an oddly pristine set of pipe jutting from the cracked and shattered hardwood. The only wall to have survived the blast was the east wall. The only reason the place was even still standing was because there was some kind of issue with the building’s owner having not been located, or so Belinda had read in the paper.

A paper Dan had insisted on having delivered seven days a week.

Goddamn it. She couldn’t even think about newspaper articles without bringing her husband back to the forefront of her mind.

A mile past the ruins of Madam Zorka’s cottage, Belinda made a left into an unmarked gravel driveway. Another quarter of a mile down, Tony Marchecini’s two story ranch house came into view. The home was white with green shutters and had a wraparound porch that circled the entirety of the house, even the back. Tony had put plain straw-colored wicker rocking chairs on either side of the front door, and the rose bushes lined up at the front of the house were thriving, even if they hadn’t flowered yet. If seen from above, the gravel driveway made an uppercase P so that people could get out without having to back down the quarter-mile drive. Since her last visit a few months back, Tony had installed a bird bath in the center of the P’s loop. Presently, a blue jay and a female cardinal, which was more a rust color than it was the bright red color of the male of the species, sat in the water, washing themselves. When they heard the hum of the Toyota’s engine and the crunch of gravel under the tires, both birds flitted away and out of sight.

Before she’d even gotten out of the car properly, Tony was coming down the porch steps, his arms wide and a goofy smile plastered on his face.

“Hey, sis!” Tony hollered. He wrapped his arms around Belinda and slapped her back a bit too hard for comfort. The impact of each smack rattled her ribs in their joints.

Ribs.

Oh God…

Tony pulled back and looked her over. The smile on his face vanished. “What’s wrong?”

Belinda sobbed (when had she started crying?) and said, “Dan left me and took everything and, my God, Tony, I think I killed someone.”

“Is that what’s all over your hood?”

*

At some point, Lei passed out. When she woke up, specters comprised of shadow and harmony loomed over her. They shifted and sang and were most beautiful. Their wispy bodies rippled like smoke in the wind. One leaned over her and whispered, “Why do you fight? Are you not happy with how you lived your life?”

A specter leaned down and stroked her cheek. “Why do you cry? Have you not lived?”

Lei woke from her dream within a dream screaming and spraying blood. She inhaled a good amount of the fluid that had collected in her throat and mouth. A coughing fit shook her. She could feel every broken fragment of bone that moved around inside her. But worst of all were the noises coming from her chest. The sound of dice being shaken in a cup. Her chest like a castanet in the hands of a Parkinson’s patient.

Coughing without being able to control her jaw was a horrible experience. Every time she hacked, her fractured mandible ground together. Then she’d inhale and her chest would clickety-click-click, and if she hadn’t been in so much agony, she might have found it all oddly funny. She was a living musical instrument. Call her one-woman band “The Sound of Broken Ribs”.

Lei laughed then, really laughed, and found that laughing hurt worse than coughing. Soon she devolved into a mixture of sobbing and giggling, a feat that could only be accomplished by the very and truly mad.

If she were going to live through this (what an unlikely concept that was), she was going to have to move. The crazy bitch who’d hit her had dragged her farther into the woods, but Lei had no way of knowing how far. She focused on what she could control right then and there. She needed to find out what she could still move and how that would help her find the road and not die.

She tried her right leg first. She was shocked that it seemed to move just fine. The left one wasn’t obeying her commands, but her right one seemed undamaged.