Chapter 41
Forty-One
CADE
God’s house isn’t as glorious as they all make it out to be.
It’s pretty bland and a bit outdated, if I’m honest. The trees could use some love— there’s more Spanish moss hanging from their limbs than actual leaves— and the siding needs to be pressure-washed and repainted.
Even in the dull yellow glow of the street lights, I can see it’s filthy.
You don’t belong here.
Don’t I fucking know it.
“Know what, babe?” Andrea asks, taking the keys from the ignition and turning to me with a frown on her pouty lips. Fuck, they’d look good wrapped around my dick.
“Oh, nothing, just preparing to get eviscerated the second I step foot in Jesus’s mobile home.”
She snorts. “You didn’t get smited at bible camp.”
I shudder. “No, but it left some scars.”
Those pretty lips (that I wanna suck and bite some more) curve into a smirk as she shoves open the car door. “Aww, was it the dancing, snacks, or blatant hypocrisy that did you in?”
“Definitely the dances.”
She laughs and climbs out into the muggy night. I slump in the bucket seat.
“Come on, I’m getting chewed up,” she whines, slapping her bare arm and muttering, “Fucking noseeums.”
“I prefer to marinate in the car, outside of the holy crematorium.”
“Which is it? A mobile home or a crematorium?”
“Why can’t it be both?”
She leans on the door. “Alright, enough stalling. There’s a very anxious grump in there who’s texted me twenty times in the last five minutes alone asking if we’re here yet.”
I bite back a smile.
“Did he really?”
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, dearest, you’ve got him dick-whipped.”
I’m fucking beaming.
As soon as I’m out of the car, she takes my hand, lacing our fingers. Though as we approach, the whispers from behind the arched door grow louder. I slow to a stop. Andrea glances over her shoulder, brows knit.
Her face blurs.
All I can see is the door. It’s morphing into a black hole. The whispers become familiar Latin chants. My girl is gone, replaced by a tear-stained ghost.
There’s darkness inside you, Cade. It’s time to cleanse it away.
I try to run, but it’s like my limbs have been removed. Nails dig into the back of my neck, her grip unrelenting. Musky incense floods my nose. I can’t breathe…
The air is so thick with whatever she’s burning that I’m gagging on the oily residue.
Duck-tape chafes my wrists and ankles, sealing the ground cayenne pepper paste she slathered into my raw skin.
It burns like acid, but it’s background noise at this point.
Now the headache? That shit is a foghorn blaring at all hours.
Not for the first time today, I wish I had my phone.
She took it away the second Dad left for his work trip.
I begged him not to go, but he said he didn’t have a choice.
I’m beginning to think he knows what happens when he leaves and just doesn’t care.
Because how could he possibly leave me alone with her?
“Cade,” Mom calls, her voice distorted by the toxic fog wafting from the bathroom. “I don’t hear you.”
My tongue is rougher than sandpaper. My lips are cracked and stinging.
My throat is aching and sore. But I weakly resume reciting the Latin prayers she learned from that fucking scam of a priest. He knows she’s sick.
He knows what feeding her this religious bullshit will do.
And he does it anyway with a big ass smile on his face.
I want to pull every tooth from his gums with a pair of pliers, then cut out his tongue.
Even though I’ve thought about mutilating him extensively, I’ve thought more about murdering his mistress. (She’s not really a secret since the whole town knows.) The bitch indoctrinated Mom into this madness, making the last few years absolute hell.
Every day, I wonder who Mom would be if she’d never joined Mission of the Faithful. And every day, I die a little more inside for hating who she is now.
Because she’s my mom. The one who put a paintbrush in my hand.
The one who let me stay up late on Fridays to watch horror movies in bed with her and Dad.
The one who let me skip school every year for my birthday to get ice cream and a new game.
The one who made us go to the sunflower festival every fall.
The one who sang a silly song for everything from doing dishes to pulling weeds.
The one who kissed my forehead every night before bed.
She doesn’t mean to hurt me.
She thinks she’s saving me.
Which is why I can’t find it in me to fight back.
Her slim figure emerges from the steam. The manic smile on her lips doesn’t touch her vacant eyes. They once sparkled with life and light before her mind cannibalized itself. Before paranoia chewed away reason. Before religious fervor erased reality.
“It’s time to free you of the demon.”
A tear drips off my chin.
Schizophrenia stole my mother and replaced her with a monster.