Chad
Ididn’t even need to read the rest of the note.
Absolutely not!
Apparently I had fucked up more than I thought, and I cursed my stupid idiocy. I had let my neurotic anxiety over work affect my wife.
And now she was planning to leave me! Panic gnawed at my stomach and I had to grab a paper bag and breath heavily into it because I was afraid I was going to hyperventilate and pass out.
Did she think I wanted to split up? Nothing could be farther from the truth! Bitsy and I were absolutely soulmates. And I knew she was the only girl for me the first time I’d ever seen her.
But maybe I had taken her for granted. Fuck.
I had been the worst kind of idiot husband.
The room hadn’t stopped spinning, and I tore at my hair in despair, knocking my head into the door several times.
If only I could have knocked some damn sense into myself before talking to Bitsy like that!
If this hadn’t happened, I’d never have dreamed of taking time off when it was so critical to make partner, but Bitsy was the most important part of my life. She always had been and she always would be.
I gave myself a second to see if I was going to throw up, then I lunged for the stairs again.
There was no time to waste. I had to get down to Bitsy’s hometown right now and make this right.
And I couldn’t risk waiting around, because I remembered from the times we had visited before that there was only one flight per day and Bitsy had already taken it.
And, unfortunately, I had always gotten the feeling that Bitsy’s family didn’t exactly like me. . .
I leaped into my car and started to drive. Every now and again I tried texting or calling Bitsy, but she never picked up.
I drove all day and through the night, guzzling energy drinks, unable to eat anything with how twisted my stomach was with anxiety.
This had to be a misunderstanding!
I couldn’t lose Bitsy.
The very thought was like a freaking horror movie. Sometimes my bros would joke like I must be sad that I couldn’t go out clubbing because I was married. But I never cared about shit like that.
What could clubbing give me? Nothing. Nothing to compare to an evening with my wife.
It wasn’t until the sun shone over the horizon and I began to see long, willowy trees and creeping moss that I finally arrived at Bitsy’s tiny hometown.
But then I encountered another problem here, and it was that my map app did not appear to like or grasp the location of the Swamp Tour business her family ran.
Like this dirt path into the swamp could not possibly be the entrance? But according to the map app it was?
I threw the car into park and got out. We must have gone a different way when I visited before, but I pushed aside the hanging vines and walked firmly down the path.
At some point I would come to something I recognized?
Right?
Big mistake.
I was buzzed as hell from all the energy drinks I’d downed to drive through the night, and now I was going in fucking circles in the backwoods.
This damn dirt path just. . . ended. In a mud puddle. Where the hell was I supposed to go now?
I forged on, stinging nettles and branches flicking across my face, twining around my arm like they were trying to drag me into the moss.
I was dripping with sweat. And I didn’t have any water.
“Help!” I called out. This wasn’t exactly going to make me look any better to Bitsy’s family, who I was pretty sure thought of me as an idiot city boy. But I didn’t know what else to do, and now I couldn’t find my car.
There were strange chitterings and hisses in the forest. What the fuck was that?
“Hello! Help! Is anyone out there?”
Wait, was that a flannel shirt I could see through the branches?
I charged forward.
“Thank fuck,” I cried, as I caught a glimpse of a bearded man walking down the road with a pickaxe.
It looked like one of Bitsy’s twin brothers, either Junior or Third.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he barked when I stumbled up behind him.
“I’ve—er, come to see Bitsy. I’m sorry, I don’t know if you’re Junior or Third.”
He looked at me like he wanted to take the pickaxe to my skull.
“I’m Junior. I’m gonna go get Dad.”
“But—what—don’t leave me alone out here! I need to find Bitsy! Where is she?”
Junior looked at me with unconcealed loathing.
“Where’s Bitsy? I just want to find my wife!”
“I heard about what you said to Bitsy.”
Fuck.
“What?” I asked, trying to play stupid. After all, I’d been stupid so it wasn’t like that was a lie.
“You know what you did,” the big man growled. “Wait here,” he added as he vanished into the moss.
Should I run like hell or wait here? What option had the better chance of not being eaten by a crocodile or bitten by a poisonous snake?
I dithered, but it wasn’t long before Junior was back with Thirds, and a man who looked exactly like them except with a salt and pepper beard.
They all eyed me with utter revulsion, silently spreading out to surround me.
I took a few involuntary steps back, almost stumbling over a rotting log.
“You don’t like whimsy, son?” my father-in-law Hayes asked, spitting a wad of tobacco on the ground directly in front of me.
“Of course I do.”
“You got some kind of objection to sushi rolls that also look like ghosts?”
“No, no. It was all a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding?”
He glanced over at his sons, and it occurred to me as sweat began to run profusely down my face that they could kill me right here and leave my body to decompose in the swamp.
“Must be a hell of a misunderstanding. Don’t like to see that hurt look in my girl’s eyes. Always tried to understand that she had a soft spot for you, even though you’re a city slicker. Even though it didn’t make a damn lick of sense for a girl who could have had anyone going for you.”
“It definitely was a misunderstanding! I absolutely adore your daughter. That’s why I’m here to talk to her.”
“Bitsy said you didn’t like the lunches she packed.”
The statement hung, ugly and heavy, around the four of us.
And the goddamn thing is that it was the truth.
“Well, I—” I foundered around.
“Did you or didn’t you?”
“Well, I did say something like that,” I protested lamely. “But I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings—”
Hayes moved the big axe around to the front of his body, and I felt sweat begin to pour down the back of my shirt.
“If I could just speak to her—“ I ventured.
“She’s back at home with Granny now. Helpin’ her set up the new birdfeeder. Bitsy really loves life. Always had a sparkle in her eye. Ever since she was a little girl. And she’s kind of been the apple of our eye, too. Only granddaughter in the family, you see.”
“I agree, she’s the most special person in the world to me too!” I said heatedly. “I made a stupid mistake. I should never have said anything.”
“Bitsy was crying,” Third said, and the damning statement reverberated throughout the clearing. I felt like sinking into the mud.
Wait, was I sinking into the mud?
Was this exactly where I had been standing? Somehow, it seemed we’d shifted a bit further, like they’d driven me deeper into the swamp. With an effort, I dragged my best leather wingtip out of the mud with an audible squelching sound.
The idea that Bitsy had been crying when she came down here made me want to throw up. I had never intended to hurt her, just encourage her to, maybe act a little differently around my coworkers?
But that was shitty and I had been shitty.
“I want to make it up to her,” I said desperately. “I’m here to apologize and beg her to come home. I was an asshole. Please let me see her.”
This time I attempted with all my strength to pull my foot up out of the mud, but it wouldn’t come. I yanked on it, but no luck. Then, with a sense of impending doom, I realized my other foot was stuck too.
“Is this quicksand?” I yelped.
“Mayhap.”
“Well, can you help me get out of it?”
Junior jabbed my thigh with the butt of his axe.
“You hurt Bitsy. We don’t like that.”
“I didn’t mean to!” I howled. “I’m here to tell her I’m sorry!”
As I began to sink deeper, I looked around desperately for something to use to drag myself out of the mire, grabbing for some weeds but they only ripped out of the ground in my hands.
I gripped a vine, began to slowly pull myself hand-over-hand as the mud sucked at my waist, flopping on my belly and scissoring my legs in an attempt to propel myself up.
“Boys, should we help him or let the swamp take him?”
But no one moved a muscle.