16. Wilting Branches
Wilting Branches
My paintbrush glides over the glass doors, a little pumpkin patch with each tiny pumpkin holding some form of movie theater concessions. This one is holding a soda almost as big as he is; the lip popped off, making the sugary drink splash over the rim.
Every season and major holiday I can count on at least a few hundred dollars as call after call from local businesses flood in asking me to decorate their windows.
Summer, Fourth of July, St. Patrick’s Day, Christmas, Valentine's, but currently, Halloween.
Fall, my absolute favorite season, and not just because my birthday is soon, almost always falling on the same weekend as the Fall Festival here in town.
That thought sobers me a bit, knowing this year I’ll stay home.
Nobody to attend with now that Jess and Bryan are most definitely out of the picture.
It’s not that I don’t have other friends; I do.
More acquaintances than I can count, I just never moved past the stigma the Bells left behind.
I catch sight of the scars on my forearm, smeared with autumnal hues.
They pretend not to see them, so I do too.
It’s easier this way. It’s certainly worse when someone asks.
After Gideon, Jess and Bryan were the only ones who…
stuck around during the ugly parts. Who visited me in the hospital the night it went too far.
The night a moment of despair and self-pity nearly ended my life.
I remember the numb disappointment I felt when I opened my eyes in the hospital.
How I stared at the doctor blankly, a friend of Dad's.
He told me Sheriff Fisher would be disappointed in me if he were still around.
How could he have thought that was the right thing to say?
Jess cursed him out.
I’d even begun to smile, a weak, sad smile but a smile all the less before Mom rushed in, her replacement kids waiting in the car outside.
They couldn’t see me like this.
What would her husband think?
She stayed for ten minutes.
I tried to kill myself and she stayed for ten fucking minutes.
I can’t help but wallow at the loss of Jess and Bryan.
Even as terrible as they were in their own right, they hung around.
Other people didn’t know how to… handle me, I suppose.
Most of our lives they were getting ran off by Gideon, then my own seclusion, Mom’s rampant cheating and binges at the local bar, then I was the Sheriff’s grieving daughter, then the girl they grew up with that slit her wrists and almost died.
I hadn’t found my place back in this town until the Johnsons had asked me to paint their windows while I was out making a bank withdrawal one day.
When Mr. Johnson asked if I still painted, I’d almost lied.
Almost said no.
But everything changed that day.
I was Audrey again.
I hadn’t felt like her since Gideon left, maybe even before that.
“Here, Auds.”
I jolt, squinting up at Trent, who took over the local movie theater fresh out of high school.
He shifts, better blocking out the sun before handing me two twenties and a ten-dollar bill, turning his attention toward the pumpkins.
“Dude, you always nail it. Thanks again for coming out on short notice.”
I smile, taking the money even though my hands are covered in paint. “No problem, the alteration shop isn’t open on Sunday anyhow.”
“You’ll be at the Kessler wedding, right?”
I groan as I stand, my knees stiff from hours of kneeling on the concrete walkway in front of the theater beside the poster for a movie called Judgment Night. I thought it was ironic considering my plans for later.
“Yeah, more to work than celebrate, I think. Ally is convinced Jim will ruin his suit on the big day.”
He laughs. “Oh well, if you uh—” He takes a deep breath, and my cheeks are already heating knowing what’s coming next. “If Bryan’s not around and you need someone to hang with, I’ll be there. All my brothers will too. Mom and Dad are back in Florida for the season.”
I offer him a soft smile. “Yeah, of course.”
“Here, let me help you pick this up.”
I tense, bending quickly to grab the brushes before him. “Ah, it’s okay, Trent. I gotta do it a certain way.”
He just laughs, his cute, boyish laugh. He’s never lost the spark most kids do when they turn into boring adults who run movie theaters.
His happiness is endless. It’s nice, tempting even to see if it would trickle down to me.
Several times when he’d be at a party Bryan dragged me to, I’d look a little longer than I should’ve.
“I’m running to Fork-n-Fuel in a bit for dinner. Maybe I’ll see you there?”
“Great minds think alike. I was headed that way too, but I’m—" I cut off, swishing the brush in the water. “I was grabbing it to go. Thought I might see if Gideon needed anything. He’s back in town, for a bit anyway.”
I’d been thinking about it all night, after the clock.
An olive branch.
“Yeah, how is he? I saw him walking down Main Street the other day. He seems…” he pauses, rethinking whatever was about to leave his mouth. “Cool.”
I just shrug, letting the silence fall over us in awkward droves, wondering if he’s judging me, not that I think Trent would. But everyone else… you know, they never liked him anyway. Never understood how much he screwed me up, and now here I am bringing him—
“Well…” Trent clears his throat, brushing his hands through his hair. “I’m gonna finish up inside. See ya later, Auds. Thanks again!”
My cheeks are bright red, no doubt, when I face him again. “See ya.”
When I finally return to my art, my eyes go straight to the stem on a pumpkin that doesn’t look quite right. I groan, rubbing my paint-smeared palms on my cheeks before I scrape it off and try again.
Gideon, Present Day, 1994
I pant, bringing my fist down on the flaccid piece of flesh again, my dark hair hanging in my face.
“For God’s sake, you can’t help it, son. I know you can’t help it, but you’re sick. You can’t… Oh God, help us. Gideon, you can’t do these things without thinking! They’ll take you and lock you away somewhere like you’re some goddamn animal.”
I wonder if he’s churning in his grave now.
If there’s an afterlife, perhaps he returned here, to his beloved family business he had to leave, his legacy he had to fucking evacuate because of me and his stupid wife.
I twist my gloved fist, my knuckles digging and mushing Bryan Jordan’s appendage against the sterile table.
My father gave up everything for me: his wife, his home, his business.
He turned his back on everything for one single promise.
That I would never come back here.
Never come back to her.
I can’t imagine he’d pictured anything going this wrong. That Jackson had never actually gotten around to signing the paperwork to pass the funeral home into his hands, or maybe he’d just not really wanted it.
My father had to have pictured something awful to make us go, more awful than me being arrested for what happened with Mom.
Perhaps even he, in his detached way, had meant to protect Audrey.
I stopped buying his the police would’ve suspected her bullshit mere weeks after we moved.
It had worked at the time. In my frazzled, overwhelmed state, it made sense, until distance allowed me to calm a bit.
I smash his dick a few more times under my fist, although it looks more like minced meat than a penis by now. I’m panting, and the buzzing won’t stop.
He’s dead.
I don’t need a medical degree to know that.
To know he was dead the moment I swung that door open, long before I took those pills from that shack he stays in and crushed them into his brandy.
I’ll have to get creative with the body.
Have to be tactful, although I think it’s a little too late for that.
Everything can be explained away, everything accounted for.
I rip off my gloves, tossing them in the trash, my knuckles bruised.
They strain and ache as I adjust my glasses on my nose, readying another pair—
“Gideon?” a soft voice calls out, making me go still.
Her footsteps are gentle, just like I remember them, as they creak overhead. How many times did I stand in this room listening to her walk above me, calling out my name? How long has it been? I inhale deeply, closing my eyes to savor the moment.
To savor her.
When I hear her trail to the top of the stairs, lingering there, I finally move. Letting the double doors burst open and fall closed loudly behind me. Letting my girl know exactly where I am. Daring her to do exactly what we both know she won’t.
Come down the stairs.
I pause at the bottom, just out of sight, listening to the sound of her shaky breath.
Listening to her hesitate. We used to play this game often, and I wonder if she remembers.
She hated the basement on her best day, but now and then something innocuous would happen, and she’d convince herself it was haunted again.
She sighs but doesn’t take another step. “Gideon, I know you’re down there. I brought dinner to say thanks for the clock. I’ll leave yours in the foyer.”
I rush toward the bottom, slowing my steps just before I come into view, my eyes finding her pretty hazel ones, her cheeks already flushed. So pretty. So perfect. I’ve tried dozens of shades, and I’ve never even come close. “Thank you, I’m glad you liked it.”
Her eyes dart behind me. “Do you have a client?”
I smirk as I reach the top landing, towering over her again. Inhaling her. My eyes tracking the paint smeared across her pretty pale skin. She must not have gotten out a lot last summer. She gasps a little as I lean in. “Why? Do you find it spooky?”
A little indignant sound leaves her throat as she steps back, lifting the bag so that it’s obscuring my view of her. “Double cheeseburger with bacon and ketchup.”
My smirk widens as I walk the rest of the way out of the stairwell. Leaving the door wide open in a dangerous offering before snatching both bags from her paint-smeared palms.
“Hey!” she calls after me as I stalk past her, heading toward the upstairs, waiting for her to follow.
And because my perfect girl hasn’t changed, not really, I know she’ll follow, just as well as I know that the next breath from my lungs will exist simply to appease her.
That every move I make, that I have ever made, was done with her in the forefront of my mind.
She’d be upset to find him like that, but she’d understand… in time.
Audrey has always been reasonable.
I lift her bag, shaking it as she trails along behind me.
Resisting the urge to look over my shoulder, to check.
“Cheeseburger with extra lettuce, tomato, onion, and mayonnaise.” She used to love mayonnaise so much she’d sneak spoonfuls of it.
I even let her feed me a couple any time she asked, despite hating the stuff.
I give in then, as she halts on the stairs.
Looking over my shoulder at her wide hazel eyes and messy blonde hair.
“Wrong,” she says simply before continuing forward, passing me.
Her arm is warm as it brushes mine, making my mind go blank.
Debating ripping my dress shirt and demanding she do it again so I can actually feel her this time.
My brows knit together as she heads upstairs, and for a moment, I can’t breathe. I got it wrong.
I got it wrong.
And here she is, in my home. On these stairs again.
Perfect and sweet and all the wonderful things that made her mine.
She pauses at the top, turning to look at me, her braid tossed over her shoulder as she places a hand on her hip, waiting.
I don’t move.
I can’t.
My chest feels warm and heavy, each breath thicker than the last. Like looking through a lens of what could’ve been had I never left.
Her hair messy, rumpled from sleep because I kept her in bed all day.
A mug full of tea I made for her clasped between her hands, warming her palms. Her denim overalls would be a robe, loosely tied.
There wouldn’t be a dead man… well, a man I killed in the basement because everyone would’ve already known, they never would’ve forgotten that Audrey Emma Fisher was off fucking limits.
I wouldn’t have spent the last ten years of my life trying to picture her just like this.
Trying to imagine what a grown-up version of her would look like and failing to create it every time.
Taking the things I knew of her before I left, forming them into a woman, the wrong woman.
“I told them to leave off the onions this time,” she offers.
“Why?”
She shrugs. “I didn’t want my breath to stink.”
I hike a brow at that, finally remembering how to work my own two feet. “Planning to kiss me, Audrey?”
She rolls her eyes. “Never.”
I smirk.