Cast a Pale Shadow

chapter Two





Cole



The Thanksgiving craziness attacked Cole with a vengeance as November ebbed away. He devised list after list of menus and supplies, ripping each of them to shreds when he would find them later, destroying the physical evidence of his compulsion. But it did not help. The lists were etched on his soul.

"That will be fifty-one dollars and ninety-six cents."

"What?" The figure shocked him to consciousness. It was more than he made last week.

"Fifty-one, ninety-six. You must be expecting a crowd for the holiday. Big family?"

"Uh... oh yes," he shrugged, fighting the rising panic as he realized his wallet did not have enough to cover the bill. Only the crumpled dollars and loose change in his jacket pocket allowed him to escape the humiliation of disavowing the paper sacks filling his cart.

When he had carried them home and stowed them away, his tiny refrigerator and pantry bulged with his lunacy, making him shudder each time he looked for an egg to boil for breakfast or a can of baked beans to open for dinner. He knew he should throw it all out but he didn't. He couldn't.

On Thanksgiving morning, he rose at five from the bed where he had tossed and turned and sweated through the night and began working. He cubed a loaf of white bread, crumbled a pan of dry cornbread and mixed them in the sink -- he had no bowl big enough -- with a half dozen eggs, melted butter, chopped onions and celery, salt, pepper, sage, mushrooms, a pound of cooked pork sausage, squishing the glop between his fingers until it felt right and stuffing the whole mess into the cavity of the twenty-four pound turkey.

While that began roasting in a pan he had borrowed from a neighbor, he peeled and boiled five pounds of potatoes for mashing, made cranberry sauce from fresh berries, orange peel, port wine and currant jelly, and creamed two cans of peas and pearl onions. Two pies, pumpkin and apple, he had bought from the bakery, sat atop the refrigerator. The brown sugar had hardened to a rock so he beat chunks off with a hammer to melt with butter for the candied yams.

The aroma of all the various dishes now mingled and forced their way into his pores, pushing him toward the brink. He had to get away from it.

He threw a coat over his flannel shirt and jeans and walked into the overcast November afternoon. He thought if he walked long enough through the deserted streets, he might lose his way and the smell of his madness might never taunt him again.

Weary from insomnia -- how many nights had he now lain awake fearing a surrender to the darkness? -- and his frenetic activity of the morning -- cooking a meal for a family that was fifteen years dead -- he fought the familiar squeezing in his heart and the thundering return of his nearly chronic headache.

But each throb from the back of his head nagged at him again and again, "No mincemeat. You forgot mincemeat," in his father's voice.

Reaching the park on Spruce and Franklin, he leaned back against the rough granite base of the Veteran's Memorial, pinched his ears shut with his thumbs and covered his face.

But in the darkness he created he saw them: Jill and Danny and Valerie and his mother, waiting, cowering in the rubble of that other Thanksgiving dinner, waiting for Duncan Brewer's tirade to stop, waiting for him to run out of dishes to smash against the wall, waiting for it all to end.

No! Cole skinned his hands back through his hair and away from his eyes and tried to blot out the vision with the rhythmic striking of his head against the monument. Succeeding at last, he slumped to the ground, gulping throat-searing air, expecting his heart to give out, praying it would.

"Are you all right, Sonny?" a voice filtered to him after a long while.

"Yes. I'm afraid so," he mumbled and forced his way to his feet.

The old woman frowned at him and offered him a silver flask. "Be thankful you're alive, if nothing else. There'll be long, cold years ahead when you're not."

Cole took a swig of the scorching liquid, then rasped his gratitude.

"Got a smoke?"

"Probably," he nodded and patted at his pockets until he located a pack of Marlboros and matches. Remnants of Nicholas. He was not surprised when he saw her threadbare gloves close over the pack and absently drop them in her own pocket when she had finished lighting up.

"Thanks, Sonny. Just what I needed. What's yer name?"

He had to think for a minute. "Uh, Baker. Cole Baker." It was his name this year. Here, so close to his old hometown, where someone might remember the other, even after all these years.

"Well, if yer hungry, Cole Baker, they're giving away turkey and all the fixin's at the Prince of Peace Mission. Two blocks down. But no hard spirits to wash it all down. They get cantankerous about that."

"Thanks, but I -- well, maybe I will," he said, getting a sudden inspiration.

"Sure, why not? It's free. Tell 'em Gertie sent you. They'll treat you fine." Gertie passed him the flask again to fortify him for the road, then patted him on the arm as he handed it back. "And cheer up, Cole Baker. Yer too good lookin' to be so down in the mouth on a holiday. When you scrape bottom, the only way to go is up, I always say."

"Or out," he suggested. "There's always out."

"Yeah, that too, I guess," she agreed as she ambled away. "Yup, I hadn't thought of that. Up or out, either way."

With new purpose, Cole wound the streets back to his flat, steeled himself for the turkey dinner's assault on his senses, and set about his task. The meat thermometer had reached fresh poultry and despite the neglected basting, the fowl was a rich, golden brown, fit for a Good Housekeeping cover.

He told himself it was the steam that brought tears to his eyes as he wrapped the bird in foil and bath towels and loaded it and the other products of his frenzied labor into the trunk of his car. He drove the entire meal to the Mission. They were grateful for it, and more grateful when he rolled up his sleeves and spent the rest of his afternoon and evening ladling out gravy and washing dishes.

He slept that night, too exhausted to dream, and for that he was grateful.

It had been his mistake entirely to stay so close to his father. The state hospital where they had moved him after the grant money ran out loomed over Cole's week like a beckoning shadow.

He had quickly found a job taking baby pictures at a local department store. He had a knack for cajoling smiles from even the most obstreperous toddler. Workdays, his life was not unpleasant, except for the headaches that blurred his vision so badly sometimes he could not focus the camera.

But on Sundays, every Sunday, he made the duty visit to Duncan and sat silent to his silence or, alternately, conversed in his one-sided way about inconsequential matters, politics, and sports. Cole mused about whether his words clattered through his father's muddled mind like echoes down a canyon, or if they were more like water balloons bursting against a brick wall.

He wondered too if he, himself, ever passed any of his lost, blank days like this, rock-like, impenetrable. The unsettling image would send him rushing home to sort through the proof that he didn't: the photographs of fresh-faced but unfamiliar girls in his portfolio, some candid, some posed, sometimes scrawled with brief love notes to Nicky from Cynthia or Laura or Beth. Their smiles both comforted and disturbed him. He half-wished he could remember them but felt an odd sort of relief that he could not.

Where were they now, all those girls, and all their love? If he knew that answer, if anyone knew that answer, would he be locked in the room next to Duncan?

When Cole woke on the day after Thanksgiving he knew he had to flee the lingering odors of his frenetic cooking. By eight, he had dressed and grabbed a couple doughnuts and a coffee to go at the shop on the corner and had set out with his cameras for Lake Michigan. He drove right into the storm.

Just outside of Holland, his car hit a patch of ice and slid off the road into a gully. If it hadn't been for the scabbed-over cut and bruised lump on his forehead, he would have blamed his lost hours on his madness. He woke disoriented and so numbed with cold that he knew if he did not get warmed soon he was in danger of freezing to death.

The door on his side was jammed, so he had to push his way out of the other side, sinking in a slushy puddle to his knees. He had been too long away from Michigan winters to remember to stock the back seat with blankets and a change of warm clothes. Or maybe he should blame Nicholas for that oversight. It was his car.

Cursing his other self, he threw his camera gear into the trunk and struggled out of the gully to the road. It was silent and white for as far in both directions as he could see. The driving snow at his back, he trudged in what he thought was the way toward Holland, trying to calculate how many miles he had covered before the accident.

Step after step, he pushed on for nearly an hour, though the reasons why he should bother were fast sliding away through the ice that clotted his brain. His third fall jogged the last of them free from their hold on him, and he did not get up. The snow made a blanket over everything and soon it would cover him as well, a nice, warm blanket he could sleep under forever. Dying wasn't so bad. Somehow he knew it wouldn't be.

Then Nicholas took over.





Nicholas



Nicholas heard the bus lumber around the corner and his shoulders sagged in disappointment. She would be gone soon and he wouldn't see her again for two days. It was unfair that the bus would come early on a Friday, robbing him of the few golden moments of his life these days. He watched her rise from the bench and straighten her skirt and pull up one drooping knee sock.

"Goodbye, Sweetheart," he whispered to her in his mind, "Take care." Replacing the cameras in the window display case he had been idly dusting since the time drew near for her daily arrival at the stop, he limped closer to the door so he could see her step up into the bus.

"Damn! Trissa, hold that bus!" he heard someone shriek. The girl he'd been watching turned her head sharply, nodded, and waved in his direction. His breath caught for an instant until he realized it was not him she greeted but a girl darting across the sidewalk from the drugstore next door. The girl clutched two packs of cigarettes in one hand and her wallet in the other while her dangling purse hung open, spilling some of its contents in her dash to catch the bus.

The blue and white vehicle swallowed both girls and they were gone before he had gathered his wits enough to seize this chance to meet her by rescuing the scattered contents of her friend's handbag. Disappointed in himself, he left the camera store and collected the lost bits and scraps from the sidewalk. A comb, a handkerchief, lipstick, and a few folded papers, there was probably nothing here that the girl would miss. They would think it peculiar if he went out of his way to return them on Monday. He shrugged and shuffled back to the store.

Trissa. At least he had learned that her name was Trissa. It was a gem of knowledge that offered the first glimmer of hope he had felt in months. Trissa.

The name sounded sweet to him, sweeter even than the rumble of the salt truck on that lonely road in Michigan last November. He had climbed out of the blackness to hail it and it had carried him to help. By the time he was released from the hospital with two toes on his left foot lost to frostbite, the highway department had impounded his abandoned car. He had had the devil of a time proving it was his, and that he was Nicholas Brewer, its registered owner.

"May I see your identification, please," the clerk had said. They were the words he most dreaded hearing.

"Well, that's the problem, you see. I seem to have brought the wrong wallet."

"Then I suggest you come back when you have the right one. We can't release a car to just anyone."

"But I'll pay the fines. I swear I am Nicholas Brewer." Nicholas sorted through the useless papers in his wallet, hoping to find some shred of evidence to prove it. The driver's license fell out to the countertop and the clerk snatched it up.

"What about this? Who is this Cole Baker?"

"Damned if I know," Nicholas answered with the truth. Though it was a name he was not unfamiliar with, he had never met the man and it confounded him to be forever finding his possessions cluttering up and complicating his life. Sometimes he thought Cole Baker did these things deliberately, but that sounded too paranoid to admit.

"Hair blond, eyes brown, height five-eleven, weight one sixty. Matches you," said the clerk, glancing back and forth between the photo and Nicholas, eying him narrowly.

"Yeah, me and a million others."

"Say, hey, is that you, Nick?" bellowed a voice from the hall and the mammoth figure of the salt truck driver filled the doorway. "Hey, good to see you all thawed out! I wasn't too sure you would." The man reached out his huge hand to engulf Nicholas' own and pump it vigorously.

"You know this guy, Roy?"

"Know him? Hell, I saved his life, as I don't mind braggin' on. This is Nick Brewer, that guy I found half dead during the Thanksgiving blow. You remember that, don'tcha?"

"How could I forget?" The clerk began stamping papers and shoving them through the grating. "We thought we'd never hear the end of it around here," he muttered to Nicholas. "Take these papers to the garage on Beaumont Street. They'll give you your car. Any valuables we found are listed on the voucher. Get them from Police Claims at the Fifth Street Station. Sorry for the delay, Mr. Brewer. You're in luck. The fines have been waived."

But that luck was the last of it until now. He'd had difficulty picking up the traces of his life again. Cole Baker's identification led him back to an unremembered apartment in Grand Rapids. The ring that held his car keys had a key that opened the apartment's door as well. He'd poked around assembling the clothing and belongings he recognized in the closets as his own.

But he couldn't stay there. He had the uneasy feeling that this Cole Baker lurked somewhere nearby, waiting for a chance to pounce and maybe try to steal his soul away this time instead of just his driver's license and his car. He would not allow himself to think further than that, to puzzle out the link Cole Baker had with his life. He mingled so intricately with his memory, his madness, and his nightmares that finding Cole Baker might mean losing himself. And Nicholas did not want to chance that.

So he packed up and left that place, taking with him a roll of money found in a drawer -- probably Baker's but let him try to prove it. It wasn't much anyway, just enough to pay an installment on his hospital bill and tide him over until he found a job.

He also took the portfolio of photographs and the cameras. They were shared possessions, Baker's and his own, as difficult as that was for him to rationalize. There was nothing rational about it, so it was best not to think on it too long.

Nicholas had himself purchased two or three of the cameras, though it was impossible now to remember which ones. He used them all. And at least half the photos in the portfolio were his. He favored people as his subject matter, portraits and candids. Cole Baker seemed to prefer landscapes and still lifes. Nicholas admired his skill with the interplay of light and shadow, something he had never had the patience to master. Neither of them had lost his soul to Polaroid yet. But maybe it was just the lack of funds that saved them.

The portfolio was like a trophy between them, captured and possessed for a season or two, then returned to the new victor without malice. Baker never harmed the portions of the collection that were his, and Nicholas kept intact those that were Baker's. He took care when using it for a job interview to de-emphasize Baker's work, leaving the best of it behind. He didn't want to get a job on the strength of a talent he didn't have.

He worked his way to St. Louis this time before Baker's pull on him had diminished to the point where he felt safe. There had been a couple of meaningless jobs until this one, which, while not exciting, allowed him to use his knowledge of photography a bit. He looked forward to the customers who asked him to critique their photos and give suggestions on how they could improve them. But they were the exception. Most just plunked down their money and hurried off with their envelopes of prints and new rolls of film.

It was evidence of the emptiness of his existence that customers of any kind were the highlight. Nicholas craved love and human contact, and for all he told himself that avoiding them would also mean avoiding the heartache and torture that came after, he found the craving overwhelming at times.

It was this yearning that drew his attention to the girl he now knew was called Trissa. She transferred busses each afternoon on the corner outside the camera shop, one of a dozen or so college girls who did so.

Trissa was a standout from the first. She stood apart literally, mostly holding herself away from the other girls, her beauty wreathed in brittle loneliness. Like Cynthia's. Like Janey's. She needed him. He knew that from the very start.

It had quickly become a pattern for him to delay the dusting of the window display until three forty-five, about the time when the girls would arrive at the intersection on their first bus. Dusting was a duty that required little concentration yet could be drawn out limitlessly, depending on the punctuality of the second bus.

The few minutes he spent watching over Trissa each day provided the fuel for his imagination. He could save her from whatever sadness kept her so aloof from the others. He could make her smile.

Each evening after work, Nicholas boarded the bus that followed Trissa's route and rode it all the way to the end. He studied the schedule and map he had taken from the rack behind the driver's seat, and carefully walked the streets back to the camera shop. At each intersection, he turned and squinted at the map under the streetlights, looked up and down the cross streets and tried to listen for her with his mind.

Maybe he would catch a glimpse of her at a lighted window. Maybe she would pass him on her way to the corner grocery or the mailbox or walking her dog.

Or maybe she transferred from that bus to yet another and she was still miles away from him.

It didn't matter. He felt so much closer to her than he did when he was home. He felt so much warmer walking on a street she may have walked. Sometimes when he reached the camera shop again, he found he did not have the will to climb into his car and drive the lonely distance to his rented room. Instead he would turn and retrace his steps to the end of the line and back again.





Trissa



In his new blue suit and maroon-striped tie, Bob Kirk whirled Edie onto the dance floor, aware of every admiring female glance turned his way. He was a looker and he knew it and it made Trissa ill to see how her mother basked in his glow. She regretted allowing herself to be recruited as coat check girl for this event. But she had thought the cloakroom would be out of the way and quiet enough to let her read. There was a test on Silas Marner on Monday and she was only on chapter four.

Instead, she found her outpost to be in a direct line with the dance floor and the ringside table where her parents polished their public veneer for all their friends and fellow parishioners. Bob Kirk had been the chairperson this year and had steered his committee to what appeared to be a rousing success, despite a raging thunderstorm. The bar was booming, the band was lively, the decorations were perfect, and they probably would make just enough profit to top last year's which would look good in the Sunday bulletin next week.

That Bob Kirk is a whiz of an organizer, people would say. He sure knows how to put on a good show, they would comment, with more truth than any suspected. You must be real proud of your old man, someone was bound to tell Trissa. Yes, real proud, she would lie with a smile that was as good a show as any he could put on.

There was a time when it hadn't been a lie, but that was so long ago now that Trissa was surprised she remembered it. Once upon a time, she had felt lucky to have such a handsome daddy, so tall and dark and warm voiced. She used to love placing her little white-gloved hand in his for their Sunday march up the aisle to their favorite pew. She would try to match his shiny shoes stride for stride and grin smugly back at Lonny who escorted their mother.

She would have the aisle seat again. She would have the pleasure of snuggling between the carved oak of the pew on one side and her Daddy's strong arm on the other. Lonny would be stuck on the end between their mother and a stranger. The little bells at the offering had a hollow, sweet sound in her special little niche, and her Daddy would slip his arm around her and glide her off the smooth wooden seat to her knees beside him, her nose just clearing the back of the bench in front of them. After church, they would go home and while her mother cooked a big Sunday dinner, she and her Daddy would pull out his old portable record player, spin his favorite 45's and dance in the living room. She only remembered happiness with her father's touch back then. It was so long ago.

Trissa was five when things changed. Her cousin Rita came to stay with them that summer. Rita was fourteen, old enough for Trissa to be awed by and young enough for Lonny, at twelve, to have his first crush on. She remembered being intensely jealous of Rita and feeling guilty for it because "Poor Rita, her mother is filled with cancer, just filled with it", and whatever that meant, Trissa knew from her mother's hushed voice, it was very, very bad. Rita's father, who was Edie Kirk's black sheep brother, had long since departed the scene. "Off to Australia. Opportunities are limitless there, you know. He'll send for Rita when we can get in touch with him."

Rita wore lots of makeup, shiny blouses that bulged at the buttons, and pencil slim skirts. Her hair was a mass of black curls and her mouth was always moving, whether chewing Doublemint Gum or chattering endlessly about the parade of boyfriends she had left brokenhearted in Kansas City. She smoked and made no effort to hide it and could match coffee drinking and gossip with her mother cup for cup and tidbit for tidbit. Rita confused the boundaries Trissa placed between adult and child, and Trissa did not know how to treat her. As it turned out, it was a confusion others in her family struggled with as well.

After Rita came, Trissa no longer scrambled out of bed early while her parents slept on Saturday morning to spend a cozy few hours nestled against Lonny while he read to her from his comic books. On the first Saturday after Rita, Trissa awoke to find that she had stolen her place. Rita and Lonny lay sprawled in their pajamas and robes on the living room floor taking turns reading the dialog in the characters' voices. Trissa stayed for a while to listen, but it just wasn't the same.

But it was Rita's effect on her father that shattered Trissa the most. As if it meant nothing at all, Rita waltzed down the aisle on Sunday next to him and sat her tight-skirted bottom in Trissa's special place on the pew.

It was Rita who plopped herself on the front seat on her daddy's regular weekend outings to the hardware store. Trissa was relegated to the back. Forgotten were Trissa's lessons on the names of all the hammers and saws, and Trissa would just whisper them to herself as she tagged along behind. "Ballpeen, claw, tack, framing, sledge. Keyhole, jig, coping, crosscut, hack." Someday her father might care again that she remembered them.

He never did. As the summer of Rita wore on, Trissa quit going with them at all and found what comfort could be had in her dolls and roller skates. It was the latter's betrayal that snapped the last thread of trust she had in her daddy.

On a summer evening when her mother had gone to Ladies Guild, Trissa and her skates had a tangle with the curb and her knees and elbows paid the price. Whimpering softly, she ran to find her father. Maybe he would have a kiss to spare to make them better. She heard his muffled laughter in the old sewing room that Rita had been given as her bedroom. Behind the closed door, she heard Rita's voice as well. Later Trissa would learn of the green-eyed monster but she would always picture jealousy as red. It was in a red haze of anger she heard Rita pleading, "Please, oh please. Yes, that feels so good," and her father's warm, rumbly "Rita, my baby, my baby."

The sidewalk burns on her knees and elbows became as nothing to the hate that had scorched through Trissa's heart at that moment. Trissa was her daddy's baby, not Rita. Not Rita! Prepared to scream that challenge, she pushed the door open. She didn't understand what she saw there. She couldn't. She was so confused that it hurt. Her daddy didn't see her at all, but Rita turned her head and smiled at her, a smile that said "He's mine. He's mine now. And you can't have him back. Never." Trissa shut the door and ran.

After all these years and all the times her father had disappointed her, she was surprised how much she still hated Rita. But Rita was only fourteen then. For all her adult ways, she was no older than Trissa had been when she regained her father's attention in a way she never wanted. Rita was a child, just a child, and maybe not to blame at all...

"Silas and Eppie. Silas and Eppie," she scolded herself and bent her head over her book once more.

Alone in the house after the dance, her parents out seeking further entertainment, Trissa was determined to put aside her memories. What good did they do her? The only thing she could control was the future. By just the light over the sink, she sliced some cold roast beef and made a sandwich, tossed a handful of potato chips on the plate beside it and poured a glass of milk. Meal enough for the few moments she could spare away from her book. She had to get good grades on this test. If the future was to be hers to control, she couldn't chance failing her freshman year.

Anxiety from just considering the possibility tied a knot in her throat that made her look at the sandwich in horror, its whiteness swimming like a blank page on an exam. Suddenly, she was not sure if she would be able to fill in even one answer. Abandoning the sandwich and milk, she took the chips, an apple, and a paring knife to her room. Cutting the apple into slivers, she alternated bites of it with the chips, sweet and salt to keep her alert, as she sprawled across the bed with her books and notes.

The bed was a mistake, and soon Trissa slipped into a sleep of fitful dreams. The dreams wove sounds of the waking world into their fabric so that when she heard her father's footsteps in the hall, she dreamed they were Professor Edwin's coming to collect her test paper.

"But I'm not finished. I need more time," Trissa told her in her dream.

"That's a shame," Professor Edwin said shaking her head and frowning. "You should have studied harder. You should..." Professor Edwin's voice trailed off and was replaced by Bob Kirk's slurred bellow.

"Teresha Marie, God dammit, wake up! Do you think I pay good money for food so you can let it rot on the sink? I'll teasch you to--"

Startled awake, with the wisps of her dream still clinging like cobwebs, Trissa clambered to her feet. But her father hovered closer than she expected, blocking her path, and she stumbled into his chest.

Suddenly, she felt his strong grasp on her arms, clinging as much to steady his own drunken instability as her clumsiness. He held her tighter than necessary as if loosening his hold might allow her to float away from him.

Her mind flashed a vivid memory of herself as a child, held tight then lifted and tossed, giggling and breathless, into the air, free falling through space to be caught, safe and warm in her daddy's arms, then tossed again. High, so high she thought she would touch the ceiling, then down, down, falling. She trusted him to catch her back then, so long ago now, so long ago. "Daddy, I..."

Then she really was falling and he with her, his hands no longer holding her but touching her, cold and possessive hands, sliding under her blouse, up her skirt.

"Don't! You're drunk! Let me go!" Her voice was a rasping squeak. She could not make herself believe this was happening. The smell of gin on his breath pricked at her throat making tears flood her eyes.

"I'll teasch you. I'll teasch you," she heard him mumble, his lips wet and mushy against her neck and down the opening of her blouse as he slipped the buttons free.

"Stop! Stop! Let me go, please!" she sobbed. "Don't do this to me! I'm your daughter! I'm Trissa. Don't, you're hurting me, Daddy!" She pushed and struggled against his sodden weight as it crushed her down into the soft mattress.

Abruptly, he stopped and pulled away from her, his eyes filled with a strange light, as if her voice, her cry of Daddy had at last stirred some faint conscience in him.

He knows me now. He wouldn't hurt me. She tried to take advantage of his sudden perplexity by wriggling free, but his knee pinned her by her bunched-up skirt.

She saw the light fade in his eyes and something else, darker, angrier take its place. He snatched at her hair and dragged her back beneath him, slapping her hard against the left cheek then backhanding her right. It was an action so familiar that she felt all hope drain from her, replaced by the same fury and rebellion that honed her sharp tongue and she fought back, kicking and flailing at him.

She pummeled him, then fell back, winding up and hitting again and again and again until her hands felt so weak she thought she could not raise them one more time. And still he pressed down on her, groping her roughly, grimly, as if it were a duty he abhorred, with a touch so harsh it bruised her skin.

A shudder of panic shook her as she realized her strength to fight him was failing. She clawed at the bedspread beneath her, frantically trying to pull herself out from under him. In the folds of the rumpled coverlet, her fingers touched something cold and hard.

The knife! The paring knife. Without bidding them to, her fingers curled around it, and she watched in horror as the knife came up with her flying hand and traced a jagged red line down her father's face and neck.

A shocked, strangled scream emerged from both their throats and they recoiled from each other. Her father's hand covered his cheek but the blood seeped through his fingers. Trissa's vision was awash with it as she scrambled from the bed. A haze of red descended on her, blinding her, fuzzing in her ears, choking off her air. She threw the knife away from her with a force that clattered it against her dresser mirror, cracking it.

"You little bitch! You could have killed me!"

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to--" But did she? My God, her heart screamed, she did. She did.

She wanted him dead. She hated him. "No. No. No," she whimpered as she backed away from him then turned and fled. Out of the room. Out of the house. Into the night.