Everything comes back.
Or most things.
Not the thing, the big thing, the vital linking scene between a freezer meal and the bloody pulp of a police officer oozing onto Mrs. Reilly’s carpet.
It’s like coming out of anesthesia. It’s not real yet. It hasn’t sunk in.
Someone else did this, surely.
She looks down at her hands. Her knuckles are bruised and swollen and red. Some of her fingernails are torn, skin and blood layered underneath them.
She did this, but she can’t remember it.
She can remember…wanting to do it, but in the normal way of any trapped animal.
So this is the Violence.
This is how it works.
She was here, and then she was gone, and now she’s back.
She has to put things together.
First she locks the door. That’s important. Her dad is waiting at home to hear from Uncle Chad, and she doesn’t want him to get curious and let himself in, which is just the sort of thing he would do. There’s blood all over the inside of the door now, but that’s something to worry about later.
Next she looks at…
The…
What happened. What she did. What’s left of Uncle Chad.
He’s on his back on the floor. His head is a pulpy mess of bone and pink brains and blood. His face is mostly gone. Beside him there’s a crystal candy dish broken in two, blood painting the glassy surface. She must’ve…
Old butterscotch candies litter the dark blue carpet like winking stars.
There’s a disturbing distance to how she sees this man she’s known and feared all her life, like viewing a gory Goya painting at the museum and knowing that it was planned and posed, that the painter stared and stared. She’s mesmerized by tiny details, by the flap of an ear and the way the blood is different colors depending on the surface it’s landed on.
She can’t tell if she’s numb from the trauma of what she’s done or whatever the Violence does, or if maybe she’s still stuck in flight, fight, or freeze.
It doesn’t matter.
She doesn’t have much time.
She strips and stuffs her clothes into yet another garbage bag and hurries to the shower and turns the water on high and scalds off all the blood and scrubs and scrubs and scrubs. Then she gets dressed in an older, ill-fitting outfit from her bug-out bag and realizes that all her real clothes are locked behind the gates of Nana’s neighborhood. Shit. She has to leave here, but she can’t go home, and she can’t wear these clothes forever. It feels horribly gross on a lot of levels, but she raids Mrs. Reilly’s closets for the clothes that she doesn’t seriously hate. Everything smells like laundry detergent and is absolutely not her style—long, swishy watercolor skirts and loose tank tops meant to go with short-sleeved cardigans and long necklaces of glass beads. Mrs. Reilly was one of those ladies who wanted to be an artsy witch.
With murmured apologies to the ghosts of the cats, she stuffs a garbage bag full of their mistress’s long skirts and tunics and even some hideous clogs and sandals, knowing that she has to live life like a videogame now, taking whatever she can while she can. She collects all of her own things, too, and takes them downstairs to Mrs. Reilly’s little white Miata, which is horribly small for her purposes but the only real option. It has gas, at least, and has been meticulously kept. The long-neglected engine turns over with barely a splutter.
She keeps glancing back at Uncle Chad while she scurries about her business like a mouse preparing for winter. Knowing Mrs. Reilly is gone, knowing her daughter Toni is either dead, in quarantine, or not interested in her mother’s things, she loots the house. She takes all the food she can eat on the road that won’t need refrigeration. She stuffs the car’s trunk with soft drinks and bottled water. She takes a blanket and a pillow from the guest bedroom and finds a flashlight and a first-aid kit in Mrs. Reilly’s hurricane box. She takes that big, sharp knife Uncle Chad threw across the room. And even though she hates herself, she combs through the old lady’s drawers and lifts every mattress, gratified and grossed out when she finds five hundred dollars in cash carefully folded in an underwear drawer, hidden amid high-waisted pink polyester panties.
Finally, the only thing left to do is the thing she’s been dreading. She heads back inside from the garage and holds her breath and plucks Uncle Chad’s keys from the carabiner on his belt. She washes the blood off her hands and peeks out the front door, scanning the street for any movement, any twitch of a curtain. When she’s satisfied that no one is watching, she moves the police car to the other side of the driveway, backs the Miata onto the street, and pulls the police car into the garage and shuts the door.
That’s when the real terror kicks in.
Not when she found a police officer dead, not when she washed his blood out from under her fingernails, not when she passed by his body five times as she ransacked an old lady’s underwear drawer.
It’s the moment she knows that someone out there might be calling the cops, reporting the strange occurrence of a teen girl driving a cop car.
Because the cops won’t come out for Violence killings anymore. They did in the first few weeks, back when she called 9-1-1 on her dad, but they always arrived too late to help anyone. Now they know there’s no point, and that whoever is being attacked will be dead by the time they arrive, anyway. So no, they don’t care about things like that. But they do care about their own, and if they call Uncle Chad and don’t get a response and then hear something about his squad car being moved around by a kid, they’re going to come here with a lot more than a gross joke about handcuffs and a speech about being good.
Back inside, she takes one last look around, trying to think of anything else she might need. The last two things she grabs are acetaminophen for her growing headache and the mermaid-shaped shaker of pepper from Mrs. Reilly’s kitchen table. She’s almost out the door when she doubles back and considers taking Uncle Chad’s gun, knife, and, yes, now-illegal pepper spray.
She’s about to be alone in the world again, and she’ll need all the help she can get…but she can’t bring herself to steal from a cop.
She locks the front door behind her as she runs to the Miata and drives out of the neighborhood with jaw-grinding slowness, checking her rearview mirror constantly for any sign of her dad. Just because he can’t see Mrs. Reilly’s house from theirs doesn’t mean he wouldn’t park down the street to monitor Uncle Chad’s progress. Dad would probably love to watch her marched out in handcuffs.
But she doesn’t see him, thank goodness.
He’s left the dirty work to someone else.