Watt nodded, sympathetic. “Let me get my clipboard and we’ll fill out the report.”
“Come on in through the back door,” she said. “I’m going to check out a few things in the house, then I’ll meet you in the kitchen.”
Back inside, Nessa climbed the stairs to the master bathroom where she looked in the medicine cabinet. Percocet and Vicodin still there. Looked in her underwear drawer where she kept a roll of cash, and it was all intact. At least he hadn’t come in the house, or these things would most certainly be gone.
After the cops had taken her statement and left, Nessa changed into her pajamas, washed her face, and brushed her teeth, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep, so she went back downstairs and got out her vapor pen. It was the only vice she allowed herself these days, since she’d quit smoking cigarettes when she learned she was pregnant with Daltrey.
It was soon after John had left that she’d discovered a store that had probably once been a head shop but now sold vapor pens. A clerk with gauges in his ears and a neck tattoo had explained how the device vaporized liquid nicotine, then showed her the different flavors. “You can get pi?a colada, raspberry, lemon--lime—-”
“Tobacco flavor, please,” she’d said.
“But we have so many—-”
“I don’t want to smoke limes or vanilla ice cream cones. I want to smoke tobacco, and this is as close as I’m going to get to the real thing.”
“Old school, huh,” he’d said with mild contempt, but sold it to her anyway.
Now she sat pretend--smoking in the dark, looking out at her beautiful property, deep dark green in the moonlight after the heavy spring rains. She and John had bought the house, buildings, and sixty acres after two things: Nessa’s music blog, Unknown Legends, had attracted its first major sponsor, and Altair Satellite Radio had offered her a twice--weekly overnight deep--cuts show. John was working at the time, at the job he’d held the longest—-two years as a maintenance tech at the Manhattan Regional Airport, so they were able to get their first mortgage.
They’d had big plans when they bought the land and house nine months ago. She and John had agreed to quit his job and become a stay--at--home dad and tend the hops vines. He’d renovate the outbuildings and add on to the house. They would have another baby. But John became depressed and irritable. Picked fights with Nessa. Started disappearing, saying he was shopping for farming equipment, but he somehow never came back with anything.
And then she’d caught John in their bathroom with his pipe and his rock. He’d brought that poison into their home where their son slept, the poison he’d sworn he’d never touch again after relapsing almost four years before. So she kicked him out for the last time.
“I’d rather see Daltrey dead than with you,” John had screamed, standing by his truck as Nessa loaded garbage bags of his clothes into the bed. This was the drugs talking, using John like a ventriloquist’s dummy, because he worshiped his son, adored him, would die for him under sober circumstances.
“You’re a shitty mother,” John ranted on. “It’s your fault he doesn’t speak. You let him get vaccinated.”
Not this again. The drugs made him buy into every conspiracy theory circulating on the Internet, especially the anti--vaxxer movement.
“It’s your fault,” he said. “You’re dirty inside and you infected him with your filth.”
She hadn’t come back with what she’d wanted to say—-that her filth was far behind her, and John’s was teeming now, this very minute, his cells and brain full of toxic evil.
“You’re my wife,” John shouted. “You can’t keep me out of my own house, away from my son.” He’d gestured about. “All this is mine. Everything you see is mine.”
Listening to him rant, Nessa was reminded of her mother. She was always talking about her stuff, was fiercely protective of what was hers. “You broke my glass. You ruined my blouse. You can’t use my car.” Mine, mine, mine.
And in that moment, she had a revelation. Instead of marrying a man like her father, the way most women did, she’d married one like her mother.
“You will be sorry you did this,” John had screamed. “You will pay for this.”
Nessa couldn’t help herself. “Of course I will,” she’d said. “Because I have to pay for everything.”
She’d gone in the house and locked him out.
Now Nessa sat at her desk and booted up the ancient Windows XP computer she used for her AA personal inventory blog. It wasn’t connected to the Internet so no one could get at the password--protected journal except her.
She got out her Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book and turned to page sixty--four, the beginnings of the resentment inventory, and read the text as she always did, although she had it memorized: “In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper.” She sighed and started typing.
Chapter Three
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