Fear Itself Read online

  I hadn’t any clear plan, but the license plates on the Mustang were still registered to John and the car wouldn’t likely be missed for a long while and other than having to change our appearances, Sarah’s and mine, I didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was going. I only knew that my best chance at a free life with Sarah was to get the hell out; out of Willoughby; out of Ohio; and out of my life. I had read about people who had lived for decades on the run with false identities. I would find a way to do the same. I had to live free until Sarah was grown and no longer needed me. That was the scope and limit of my plan. The rest I would make up as I went along.

  At the bank I used the drive-through automated teller to draw a total of eight- thousand dollars cash from my credit cards, the maximum from each one. I would have to wait until later in the day to withdraw my checking funds, a few thousand dollars.

  I stole through the small city of Willowick, down Vine street, past the K-mart, the Wal-Mart, the Sunoco station with it’s yellow and blue sign which was open twenty- four hours, the Walgreen and Drug-mart pharmacies, and the mini shopping mall where the Tops grocery store had stood and right onto

  State Route ninety-one and onto the freeway, State Route two, and westward onto Interstate ninety through Cleveland, its dirty houses and streets hidden behind embarrassingly pink concrete walls, and past the shore of Lake Erie where the torrid surf suspended a regiment of lake-gulls a few feet above and the water splashed so high against the break-wall that it showered the highway and my car with its spray more than one-hundred yards away, and past the towering buildings and choking smog of downtown Cleveland and the Cleveland Browns stadium where my heart had been broken so many times, now for me the last, and the Cleveland Indians stadium where my hopes had been raised and lowered like a roller- coaster ride since I was a boy, and on… to more pink walls and dirty houses and then the suburbs and out to the sweet smelling countryside with fields of corn, and cows and red barns and farmhouses and other cities with other pink walls which hid other dirty houses and streets.

  Sarah slept.

  7

  In Valparaiso Indiana I stopped at a bank branch and withdrew what little money I had left, two-thousand seventy-one dollars and twelve cents.

  “May I ask why you’re closing your account with us Mr. Derrick?” said the heavy- set grey haired mannish looking teller with glasses.

  “They’re giving out free toasters at my new bank.” I smiled.

  “We give you fifty dollars to open accounts here.”

  “Yeah, but these are really nice toasters.” I said.

  After sporting a scornful frown the teller counted out my two-thousand seventy- one dollars and twelve cents and then stuffed and handed me an envelope filled with green bills before dropping a dime and two pennies into my open palm.

  Sarah woke when I got back into the car. The rocking motion of the road had kept her adrift for over four hours.

  “Where are we daddy?” She craned her neck to look through the passenger window.

  “We’re in Indiana.” I smiled at her, “Are you hungry?”

  She rubbed her eyes, “Yeah, can we eat inside, like a date?” she said through a yawn, the word “date” sounding like a groan.

  “Sure.”

  “Why are we in Indiana?”

  “No reason.” “How far away is it from our house?”

  “Not far enough.” “Daddy….tell me how far.” “Forty miles.” I quipped. “Wow. That’s a lot.”

  We stopped at a diner housed in a silver mobile home style structure and I, having a healthy appetite for the first time since Catherine’s death, ate bacon and eggs over easy and home-fries and buttered rye toast with black coffee. Sarah ate pancakes with a whipped-cream smile and maple syrup and white toast and an orange juice. I looked at a map and plotted a route to Louisville Kentucky as a diversion for the authorities. Sarah sat slumped on the red cushion of our booth trying to shake the sleep-dust from her head. The sizzle of food frying on the grill and the crackle of grease percolating in the deep fryers was muffled by the voices of the brunch crowd and the occasional ring of the service bell which signaled the waitresses that an order was ready “Table six!”

  “Where are we going daddy.” This time

  Sarah suppressed her yawn. “For a ride.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Her eyes crimped and her lips pursed in exasperation, “But where?”

  “We’ll call it a vacation.” I finished cutting up her pancakes and returned her plate to her, “How would you like to play dress-up tonight Sarah?”

  “Daddy, you don’t play dress up.” She grinned, brown sap dribbling down her chin.

  “I know, but tonight I’m going to dye my hair and buy some funny clothes.” I gauged her reaction. She smiled a big smile. “And I’m going to grow whiskers until I have a beard and mustache.”

  “You’re going to grow them tonight.”

  I laughed, “It might take more than one night, but I’m not going to shave for a long time.”

  “You’re gonna look funny daddy.” She pursed her lips and held back a chuckle. “Can I dress up too?”

  “Are you going to grow whiskers?”

  “No! I can’t grow whiskers! I’m a girl!”

  “Grandma has whiskers.” I smiled

  “I know.” She giggled.

  “I have some special lotion that will make you grow whiskers.”

  Sarah scrunched her face and drew her eyebrows into a frown.

  “Well maybe we can dye your hair instead. What color would you like?”

  “Pink!”

  “Pink? Are you crazy? You don’t want pink hair do you?” Sarah giggled, “How about if we dye your hair red?”

  “Okay! Can we cut it too?” She brushed aside her giggle as if through wet locks and sat up straight donning a serious hopeful expression.

  “Sure, but just a little bit, okay.” Sarah had been begging me to let her cut her hair for months. Her best friend, Gretchen Fuchs, in second grade, had had her hair cut to shoulder length, a bowl cut Catherine had called it, but I loved Sarah’s long Beautiful hair and I was reluctant to let her cut it. Now I had no choice.

  When we got back onto the highway, heading south now on Interstate sixty-five, Sarah fell quickly asleep and I tuned the radio to a local light rock station. The Eagles were singing “You Can’t Hide Your Lying’ Eyes” and the guitar rhythm carried me back to an earlier day with Catherine when we had both defied our parents by sneaking off to the Eagles concert at the Richfield Coliseum; the night when we first made love. I was grounded having been caught with a pack of cigarettes, which I claimed I was holding for a friend but was not. Catherine’s Aunt (her summer guardian), having heard that I smoked cigarettes, forbade her to go out with me again. But I had already purchased the concert tickets prior to my sanction and I was on my best behavior at home hoping to beg for a last minute reprieve, a furlough, in order to go to the concert with Catherine. But my last ditch effort failed and I resigned myself to my room, that is until Catherine tapped on my window.

  “Come on. I got us a ride.” Catherine’s face was made up with blue mascara and red lipstick and black eyeliner. She wore a pair of pink satin shorts which highlighted her slender bronzed legs and a pink cotton blouse, tails tied about her waist to show off her narrow midriff, that was cut tantalizingly low offering me a rare peak at her cleavage and I couldn’t help but think that… made-up as she was… if I didn’t go with her that night that someone was going to steal my flower away.

  “I can’t. I asked my parents and they said no.” I said, the tone of dejection dribbling from my tongue.

  With the twang of the south engraved in her tonsils she challenged my budding manhood,

  “Don’t be a wimp. Climb out your window and come on.” She pointed to a faded blue Oldsmobile Cutlass that I recognized as belonging to her Uncle Albert and I could see my best friend Tommy Sullivan sitting in the back seat.

  Tommy was as much in love with Catheri
ne as I was, but he had backed off of his pursuit on my behalf, a token of our childhood bond. I wasn’t so sure of his will power, though, given the atmosphere of a seventies rock concert and the evening’s most Beautiful blossom in full bloom that night. So I turned my little black and white television on at an audible volume and wedged my desk chair beneath the handle of my bedroom door and I slipped outside through my window, risking unimaginable retribution, to be with my girl.

  That night after the concert, the sound of “Hotel California” still ringing in our ears, we dropped Albert’s car off in the street (coasting to a stop in front of his house with the headlights off), and said goodnight to Tommy and we walked down the street to the ball-field a block away from my house and we made love on home-plate, the very spot where I had stood just a few years earlier when I parked my first home-run in little-league baseball.

  We were clumsy as we kissed, stoned on marijuana for the first time, and we sank to the ground as our lips melded together. To that point we had groped at one-another during rare private moments of our courting through thin layers of denim and cotton, occasionally evoking a soft sigh, a brush ever-so-close to the pleasure that we had only experienced alone behind locked door.

  I remember sliding my hand crudely across Catherine’s soft inner thigh, the tremor of inexperienced impatient anticipation quaking my fingers, and up the leg of her pink satin shorts as she sat on her knees facing me in a tongue-tied embrace, and through her white cotton panties damp with anticipation I first felt the folds of her flower, the soft rolls of her plump nether protectors of the forbidden opening and with the effort it takes for a bee to steal the nectar from a blossom I felt her shudder and tremble as she pressed her forbidden opening to my fingers and her open mouth to my shoulder. From there we frantically undressed, groping and grabbing and pulling, until in just as short a time I ejected my seed prematurely on Catherine’s naked thigh, the mere brush of her most tender place with my erect penis too much for my mind to constrain.

  She swiped my stickiness from her thigh with a finger and touched it to her lips, tasting me, and said “I don’t think we have to worry about my getting pregnant from that.” She giggled. “Maybe we should try again.”

  “Getting pregnant?” I was horrified and instantly impotent.

  “Gosh, no! Silly.” She smiled up at me, her eyes a little bloodshot from the waning effects of the weed we had smoked. “I want to, you know, really do it…tonight…with you. I only want to do it with you, ever.”

  I gazed down at her, soaking in the crescent rays of her dark blue eyes, seeking not only reassurance that she would not get pregnant, but reassurance that she wanted to actually try again after the abortion I had just performed.

  “I won’t get pregnant if we do it tonight. And I really do want to do it with you.

  I think I love you Mathew.”

  And with no time spent to repair due to the virility of my youth I did, however clumsily, divine myself to her opening and with just a few strokes I once again expelled my seed, however prematurely, on target.

  We never saw the beam of the flashlight as it approached or heard the huffing of Catherine’s Aunt Teresa’s rasping breath. We only felt the shame of our exposure as the lamplight uncovered our nakedness and the lash of Teresa’s whipping hand as I did my best to cover Catherine’s bare body with my own, an effort that in reflection now seems somewhat selfish rather than selfless as I relished the touch of her loins even at the moment of our apocalypse, and to shield her from the blows of Teresa’s capable slaps. “Get off of her you perverted shit!” she screamed revealing to me for the first time her ability to peasant her words.

  Our naked bodies were covered from head to sticky crevice in the powdery brown dirt of the sandlot as we scooped up our clothes and clambered to defend ourselves while we scrambled into our clothes and ran away from Teresa, together, hopping and hobbling, while trying to dress, and to exchange what few garments we could salvage from the me’lay, mine to me and hers to her, and Catherine’s

  Aunt Teresa still in hot pursuit.

  We scampered across the road, past the rushing headlights of cars as we crossed the Grovewood Avenue still partially naked and sprinted to our hide-out, the decaying garage of an elderly widow who rarely left her house, and we laid together all night in each others arms in the back seat of a dusty broken down Ford Fairlane, staving off the inevitable separation and unimaginable discipline that we both knew was forthcoming.

  I later learned that my Father having come looking for me in the few places he knew I might be: at the basketball court across from the ball-field, or at Teresa and Albert’s house visiting Catherine, had left me to face a more fearsome creature than himself by suggesting to Teresa that the next best place to find me would be at the baseball diamond.

  As I drove down Interstate sixty-four the Eagles wound down the final chords of the song “Lying Eyes” all I could think about is Catherine saying “I only want to do it with you, ever.” And the pain of her betrayal scorched my soul.

  It was not Catherine’s betrayal alone that had left me in such a melancholy state. It was also the lie that followed: namely that Sarah was my flesh and blood. It was an implied deception, but a painfully brazen untruth none-the-less. And the worst of it was that she had allowed me to fall head-over-heels in love with Sarah and I was inextricably tied to her. I had suggested to Catherine on several occasions, after realizing that she was not going to get pregnant despite our undying efforts that we look into adoption. The option was there. But Catherine had refused saying that she wanted to experience the whole pregnancy from conception to delivery. Without that, she said, she did not think that she could love the child as a mother should. “The attachment would be superficial.” She said. How wrong she was. It would have take bullets to separate Sarah from me. And as I looked down at Sarah, mile markers whizzing past us like memories to an amnesiac, I knew unconditional love for the first time. I’d carried it since Sarah was born; but now that I knew that she was not of my blood, that I had been duped, and yet could not fathom a life without her still, I knew unconditional love beyond the comprehensive definition. I squeezed her hand and felt the warmth of her love as she curled her little digits around my finger.

  Despite her betrayal, I still loved Catherine. Killing her would have been tantamount to suicide. Perhaps what pained me even more than the ultimate betrayal, making me a cuckold, was that I was still in love with her. I wanted to hate her; to wish her hellfire and damnation; but I still loved her with all of my heart and her duplicity was thus all the more confusing and excruciating.

  Catherine and I met, as most lovers meet, by fate of proximity. That is to say because we came to live close to each other, even if for just the summers which Catherine came to spend in Cleveland habitually, the opportunity for us to fall in love existed. And as a result of a mixture of thermo-chemistry and the oddest of opportunities, we did ultimately fall in love with one-another.

  I was fourteen years old and in the awkward stages of puberty: voice changes, sporadic splotches of acne blemishes (always a new pimple to fill the ranks of a fallen soldier)

  unsolicited erections at the most inconvenient moments and just enough hair on my lip to indicate that I was a man, but not near enough scruff to actually be one. In short: the most memorable yet forgettable days of my life. I was maybe five-foot six with jet black shoulder length hair, as was fashionable for the seventies, always dressed in raggedy denim jeans and tattered tee-shirts. I lived in a hallmark neighborhood in the suburb of Cleveland Heights in one of the few rented two story two family houses on the street.

  As a child I used to hang out with Tommy Sullivan (a juvenile delinquent to be sure) a burly ox of a boy about six inches taller than me and about twice my weight. He had sandy brown hair and brown eyes encompassed in darkened circles which hovered above his scowling jaw (as if by puppet strings) which I swear he clenched deliberately and constantly to intimidate anyone who crossed his path. Tommy and I spe
nt most of our time playing baseball in an overgrown field, with a wood and chain-link backstop and old car-mats for bases, at the end of our street with some twenty or so other kids who shared our obsession with the sport. We would often rise at sunrise and sit on our respective stoops waiting until a decent hour, as my mother used to say, for the opportunity to bolt to the ball-field. We would get their by eight in the morning and would often play until dark, or until one of our siblings, or god forbid, one of our mothers dragged us away under the threat of our father’s leather belt.

  If it wasn’t baseball at the diamond it was dodge-ball in the middle of the street, a game where the object was to hit anyone in the game with a bouncy plastic ball without them catching it, and you got three chances before you were out of the game. The game would begin with just a few of us, say Tommy and I and the Landry family (there were so many

  Landry children that I wondered how their parents had time for anything but procreation). Before we knew it there would be thirty or forty kids playing dodge-ball in the street, jumping and running and evading, and the Beautiful song of kids squealing and screaming and laughing would fill the air, stifled only by the acorn and buckeye trees that lined the front yards of our street and the thick damp summer air that dewed the lawns. The game might begin a few hours before sunset and last until past the dawn of the street-lamps until the fireflies and mosquitoes and our parents chased us back into our houses to our dinners and baths and prime-time television with a choice of three fuzzy stations.

  Our lives were so carefree at that age. Tommy and I lived for playing games scheduled around unimportant things like going to school and mowing our lawns and delivering newspapers. Carefree, that is, until Catherine came to visit Teresa and Albert, an older childless couple, who invited their niece to come visit from the hills of Kentucky.

  Catherine arrived like a southern angel from a foreign place called Louisville (pronounced “Louisville” by the natives) Kentucky. She arrived one evening while Tommy and I were immersed in a game of whiffle-ball. I was standing in the outfield (Mr. Crosby’s, or as we called him, shot-gun- Harry’s, front lawn) when Albert pulled up with Teresa in the front passenger seat and a bonnet bobbing on an unknown head in the back of their dark blue Oldsmobile Cutlass.