IT GOES ROUND AND ROUND by H. Claire Taylor
My daughter Cassidy said she was done with college—not
graduated, just over it. She said the only people who went were liberals,
assholes, or both. Said she’d promised herself she wouldn’t become just one
more liberal asshole to add to the bunch, and decided to take the nobler route
of waiting tables. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t
just finish her last semester and then
wait tables, since she was graduating with a liberal arts degree and would
probably end up as a waitress for a time, anyway.
I hadn’t thought too much about what she’d confessed to us a few days after she’d first moved home. To be honest, I’d done my best to put it behind me, and told both Cassidy and my husband Pete to do the same. Easier said than done, I guess, because it popped back into my mind one night a few months later while I laid awake in bed.
I wasn’t sure what first stirred the memories. Maybe it was just because it was too hot in the room to sleep. Maybe that reminded me of the summer. Pete had turned the light off at the wall, taking the ceiling fan with it, even though I’d done my best to break him of that habit nearly every night of our twenty-one year marriage. The master bedroom of our double-wide was stagnant and so silent I could hear a fly caught between the blinds and the window pane, buzzing around helplessly. I never will understand how, even by accident, flies can’t find their way out between one slat or another. Either way, I was sure that he’d be dead on the windowsill come the next day. And good riddance to him.
Pete was sound asleep next to me, snoring slightly. His sleep apnea would kick in soon, and no matter how much I would want to wake him just to get him to breathe, I knew the amount of bitching he would do about his so-called heart problem would surely be more annoying than the long, breathless pauses and his abrupt gasps for air. See, Pete didn’t have a heart condition, what he had was acid reflux, and it didn’t matter how many doctors told him his heart was just as healthy as it could be for a man his age, he still insisted there was something wrong.
“If it’s all fine,” Pete would say, “then why does it hurt right where my heart is?” He always looked as if he’d asked some genius question that might finally stump the doc, but it never did. They’d usually just look at me to see if I could help them tell if he was joking, and I’d usually just roll my eyes and shake my head. What else can you do when you got a husband like that?
So, I ignored those snores that would lead up to his gasping and pretended he was awake, convincing myself that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep on account of thinking about last May. I scooted over in the bed towards him and tried to spoon. He grunted, snorted, and moved around until I finally rolled away onto my back again. I knew it was too hot to spoon, but I’d suddenly felt the need.
Maybe our mutt, Scamp, would come lay at my feet for a while. Scamp was some sort of weenie mix, but other than that, we had no clue. He had shaggy hair, but still shed all over the couch like it was his goddamn job, and was covered in these crazy black and white spots that really left us baffled about what had humped what. Cassidy called him “the long dog with the endless piebald side.” I’m still not too sure what the hell that means, even after she explained that it was a reference to some Stephen King book she’d read. Now, I’m not one to censor books—hell, it wasn’t until my generation that my family even learned to read—but I’d always felt uneasy about her reading stuff from him. She was an adult, though, so there wasn’t much I could do.
But the “long dog” was nowhere to be found right then. Not like having an extra body in the bed would make the muggy conditions any better, it was just that I suddenly felt edgy and craved a warm body to hold, even if it was a bastard dog like Scamp.
We all knew Scamp preferred Cassidy, partly, I suspected, because she walked him and fed him on a regular basis. Pete and I were never very good about that. Luckily, Scamp had gotten fat while Cass was away at school, so she only suspected that we hadn’t been walking him, and didn’t have a clue that we hadn’t really been feeding him. Turns out, dogs like being fed, so he loved her more than us and had taken to sleeping in her bed since she’d come home, instead of crowding me and Pete’s legs every night.
A faceless silhouette of him surfaced in my mind, and I had to cram it to the back of my brain. I didn’t know what he looked like, and that was a blessing. If I had a face to put to that silhouette, I might not have ever been able to keep him out of the front of my mind.
“See?” I whispered, careful not to wake Pete, “This is why you can’t be thinking about the summer. Or the future.”
I was suddenly very thirsty, but didn’t dare get out of bed. I couldn’t figure why, but I felt like complete chicken shit. Maybe I was just overtired. Or maybe it was that faceless picture of him that lingered in my mind.Of Cassidy’s him.
It’d been a while since he’dpenetrated my thoughts. I’d pretty much blocked him out within a few weeks after Cassidy had told us about him. There was no point letting myself get all obsessive about something we weren’t going to change. But now it seemed I’d opened Pandora’s box too late at night for my weak mind to stand a chance of closing it.
My stomach and chest clenched as a scene from the end of May popped into my head. I was suddenly back at the kitchen table, and Cass had just dropped her bombshell.
“Y’all are going to press charges, aren’t you?” she’d asked Pete and me.
I didn’t look up from the plastic tablecloth. I just stared at the goddamned picnic-blankety red-and-white-checkered pattern, absentmindedly tracing the lines with my finger.
“You want us to press charges?” I’d asked. I finally brought my eyes up to hers. “Don’t you think that would just make this whole thing drag out?”
I was sitting at the table with Cass, but Pete couldn’t get himself to sit down. He stood with one hand bracing on his hip and the other clutching his heart, which I suspect he thought was about to give out on him.
“How long ago did this happen?” he asked. He sounded angry, but I think both me and Cassidy recognized it for what it really was: horror.
“A few weeks ago. May fifth,” she said.
The hand on his hip flew up into the air in exasperation before landing on his forehead.
“Cinco de Mayo!” he said, outraged. “He did that to you on Cinco de Mayo!”
If there was something blasphemous about that, I sure didn’t catch on. But I reckon he would’ve shouted anything at that point.
“But Mom,” she continued, ignoring Pete, “we have to press charges. Otherwise he’ll just do the same thing to other girls and—”
I guess I caught whatever Pete had and started doing some yelling of my own. “Then let the other girls’ parents press charges!”
She should have been crying, but she wasn’t. I might’ve been crying if more of me was willing to admit that what she was saying was true, that it could actually happen to our girl.
Just because she’d gone off to college, survived lethal doses of alcohol during her freshman year, and become financially independent didn’t make her any less of our little girl, the same little girl who’d taken way too long to stop shitting her diapers.
“Listen, Cass, you’re over eighteen. We can’t do this for you. If you want to press charges, you can to do it for yourself,” I’d said once I’d calmed myself.
Pete seemed to agree with me, even though he shot me a look so dirty I thought I might never be able to clean myself of it.
That evening, while Pete and I sat in bed reading, Pete turned to me and told me that he planned on killing that son of a bitch if he ever found out who it was. I told Pete that that was probably why Cass wouldn’t give us a name. He said he didn’t care what he had to do to bribe a name out of her, he would find out who it was and kill him. I found myself reminding him that she was an adult, and we couldn’t protect her anymore. Even as the words escaped my mouth I wanted to scream. I knew it was bullshit, but what was worse was that I knew it was the only bullshit we could afford to live by.
The next morning at breakfast Pete asked me if we might want to find some professional help for Cass, maybe make her want to go back to college.
As always, Pete was putting me in the position of being the realist of the relationship. He knew damn well we didn’t have the money for that, and now I was going to have to be the one to seem cheap and heartless. Without even looking up from the newspaper want-ads, I gave him the answer he knew was coming. “And how are we going to afford that?”
It was cheap. It was heartless. But it was true.
We’d been living off savings and whatever high-interest credit cards we could get our hands on since Pete had lost his job at the Toyota plant. All we had was my part-time secretarial job, and that didn’t even cover our payments on the double-wide. Food stamps would be next and before too long.
We all knew that a psychologist was out of the question just like pressing charges was out of the question, and that reality made my gut feel like it was starting to rot.
“Stop thinking about it!” I said, pulling my mind back to the stuffy bedroom, fan off, Pete snoring. The fly in the blinds had stopped his frantic buzzing for a second, and I hoped he was finally dead.
It would be a relief for both of us, I thought, though I didn’t really know what I meant by that.
But the buzzing started again, and I knew it would’ve been too good to be true if the fly was dead so soon. It had a good three hundred more circles to complete before it’d served its sentence.
The buzzing repetition started to give me a headache, and soon I was feeling the full effects of motion sickness. Before much longer, I was fixing to spew.
I jumped up and ran to the bathroom, temporarily forgetting my fear of getting out of bed. I braced myself on the wood-paneled wall and stared into the toilet bowl, but all I could get out was some rusty-tasting spit. I stood there a second longer till I was sure nothing more would come up and wiped my mouth off with some toilet paper. But I didn’t flush it down. Flushing a toilet never seems like a good idea when you’re feeling edgy.
I avoided looking in the mirror and darted back to my bed, throwing the covers over me up to my chin. My heart was pounding. The silence wasn’t helping.
But it wasn’t silent for long.
I heard a sound coming from down the hall. At first I thought it might be the air conditioner grinding again, but I thought I’d turned it off that afternoon to avoid it getting more damaged before we could afford to hire a repairman. I considered getting Pete out of bed to check on it, but figured it would likely just turn itself off the minute he stood up.
But the noise didn’t stop. In fact, it got louder pretty quick, and it wasn’t too much longer before I realized what was making the sound: Scamp was growling at something. It sounded muffled coming out of Cassidy’s room, and I tried to think of what that damned mutt could be growling at this time of night, but my mind came up blank. A chilling fear tingled through my body as Scamp’s growling erupted into barking. But while the barking scared me, and even roused Pete’s groggy ass, I wouldn’t have been able to drag myself out of bed if it hadn’t been for the fact that Cassidy began screaming.
Not yelling, screaming.
As I flung open her bedroom door, Pete wasn’t more than a few steps behind me, and he, at least, had the sense to flip on the hall light, which shot into Cassidy’s room, falling on the end of the bed where Scamp was lunging straight at her, barking his head off like he’d gone mad.
Pete pushed me out of the doorway, ran into the room, and threw the dog off the bed so hard that I worried Scamp’s skull might be cracked from smacking into the wall. But the long dog was still conscious, though he stayed cowering on the ground, whimpering. I knew what I’d seen, but it didn’t make sense; Scamp wasn’t the type of dog to randomly attack someone, especially not Cass.
Cassidy was still hysterical, even as I sat down on the bed and put my arm around her.
When Scamp got off the ground and started towards the bed again, I saw a look on Pete’s face that said he wasn’t above murdering the family dog, but before he could take another swing, Cassidy interfered.
“It wasn’t Scamp,” she said.
“What wasn’t Scamp?” I asked.
“It wasn’t Scamp who attacked me.”
As soon as she’d said it, I saw Pete’s right hand fly up and clutch at his heart. I don’t know if it was his so-called heart problem or if he just felt the same way I did, like my heart was beating so hard that it might pop out of my chest.
Pete flipped on the bedroom light and sat down on the end of the bed, waiting just as impatiently as I was for Cassidy to muster the words to tell us what exactly was going on here. I don’t think Pete or me really wanted to hear what she had to say, but we were stuck.
In spite of the dread I felt numbing my brain, one of my dad’s old sayings popped into my head: “Just one of those times where you got to hold on to your ass and your wallet and hope for the best.”
“It was… nothing…” Cassidy said, and I had half a mind to let her leave it at that. But the screaming. People don’t scream like that at nothing.
“Was it a nightmare?” Pete prompted, obviously hoping for an explanation that we could laugh about in the morning.
Cass snapped her head up to face Pete, and I saw in those eyes a mixture of resentment and vulnerability that I’ll never forget.
“No, Dad. It wasn’t a nightmare.”
“Then what the hell was it?” he demanded.
I shushed him and motioned with my hand for him to take it down a notch.
Scamp pawed at the bed, and Cassidy patted the comforter, giving him the go-ahead to jump up and snuggle into her lap.
“It was sort of a man, I guess,” she said.
I felt all the muscles in my back clench as I took a quick look around the room, but I didn’t spot anyone.
Pete went a step further, checking inside her closet and behind her bedroom door.
“Well he’s not here anymore,” Pete said.
I wanted to hit Pete for acting the way he was. There was just no way that someone else could get in the house without us hearing him.
“Pete. Sit. Calm down,” I said.
“I swear someone was here, but he just disappeared. Don’t look at me like that, Mom. Listen, it was someone that was here, but at the same time not here—and no, Dad, it wasn’t a nightmare—and then I guess as soon as it heard you coming down the hall, he… it disappeared.”
She wasn’t making any sense to me, so I looked at Pete, trying to see what he made of it. I could tell he was prepared to believe every word that came out of her mouth.
I had a feeling I knew what this was really about, but also knew that I’d be alone in my thinking as long as Pete preferred Cassidy’s side to reality.
She needed a psychologist, I knew that much, but there was just no money for it. She’d just have to work this thing out for herself, and we’d just have to hold on to our ass and our wallet in the meantime.
The clock on her bedside table read 4:30 am, and I couldn’t believe just how long I’d been lying awake in bed, thinking about why Cassidy had moved back home. But had those memories not been fresh in my mind, I might’ve been almost as gullible as Pete, actually believing that Cassidy had seen whatever it was she claimed to have seen. But those memories were fresh, and I could connect the dots just as well as the next person.
So I said, “I’ll go put on some coffee, since I don’t see us getting anymore sleep tonight,” and left for the kitchen.
It wasn’t long before Pete came rushing into the kitchen, dragging Cassidy by the arm behind him.
“Look!” he said.
I turned around to see what I was supposed to be looking at, and he held out Cass’s forearm, pulling up her long sleeve to reveal a set of scratch marks.
“Look at these,” he said. “They’re fresh.”
They sure were.
I ran a finger lightly over one of them. I guess I was checking to make sure they were real. Cassidy flinched slightly at the touch.
“Looks like Scamp got you good there,” I said.
She jerked her sleeve back over them and tucked her arm behind her back.
“No. It wasn’t Scamp. I already told you that.”
I sat down at the kitchen table, finding myself entranced once again by the red-and-white-checkered pattern. I hadn’t been up this late since Cassidy was sick with the flu in first grade. Things started to wobble and blur out of the corners of my eyes.
“If it wasn’t Scamp, what was it then?” I asked. “Nothing else it could be.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said, and with that, the conversation was over.
But there was still no going back to bed.
Pete put in a movie, and as he as Cass sat on the sofa and watched It’s a Wonderful Life, I stared out of the small kitchen window into the woods behind us. The rope from Cass’s old tire swing still dangled like a hangman’s noose from one of the trees. I’d been meaning to take it down for years, but things like that go by the wayside so easily. I guess part of me was still hoping that she’d ask us to put up another tire for her.
Soon as the coffee was ready, I brought Pete a cup. Cassidy was already asleep with Scamp curled up behind her knees, and we thought it was best if she stayed that way for a while.
I went back to my place at the window and stared at the old, limp rope as my mind fought off all the thoughts it could. One got through, though.
It was that damn fly.
I could still picture it buzzing back and forth between the window and the blinds. Maybe it’d somehow lucked out and blindly found its way through the slats. The question kept eating away at me until I had to go check to see.
I went into the bedroom and drew up the blinds.
The fly was dead on the sill.
I walked back towards the living room and stopped in the doorway.
“Pete,” I said. “This shit’s bound to keep coming round and round again.”
I don’t know if Pete heard me or not, because he didn’t say a thing and kept his eyes on the TV as Jimmy Stewart took to yelling at his perfect little family.
“She won’t find her own way out, Pete,” I said. “What can we do?”
He heard me that time.
“Nothing,” he said, unable to hide the bitterness in his voice. “We can’t do a damn thing. Not one goddamn thing.”
More than anything else that night, it was Pete’s matter-of-fact words that left me speechless.
I stood in that doorway for a long time, just leaning against the frame. As the movie finished, daylight began sneaking in through the living room window, casting stripes of shadow and light over Cassidy’s still body. I thought I’d help her stay asleep as long as she could, so I walked across the room and twisted shut the blinds, holding my breath as the beams of light thinned across her face before disappearing completely.
I hadn’t thought too much about what she’d confessed to us a few days after she’d first moved home. To be honest, I’d done my best to put it behind me, and told both Cassidy and my husband Pete to do the same. Easier said than done, I guess, because it popped back into my mind one night a few months later while I laid awake in bed.
I wasn’t sure what first stirred the memories. Maybe it was just because it was too hot in the room to sleep. Maybe that reminded me of the summer. Pete had turned the light off at the wall, taking the ceiling fan with it, even though I’d done my best to break him of that habit nearly every night of our twenty-one year marriage. The master bedroom of our double-wide was stagnant and so silent I could hear a fly caught between the blinds and the window pane, buzzing around helplessly. I never will understand how, even by accident, flies can’t find their way out between one slat or another. Either way, I was sure that he’d be dead on the windowsill come the next day. And good riddance to him.
Pete was sound asleep next to me, snoring slightly. His sleep apnea would kick in soon, and no matter how much I would want to wake him just to get him to breathe, I knew the amount of bitching he would do about his so-called heart problem would surely be more annoying than the long, breathless pauses and his abrupt gasps for air. See, Pete didn’t have a heart condition, what he had was acid reflux, and it didn’t matter how many doctors told him his heart was just as healthy as it could be for a man his age, he still insisted there was something wrong.
“If it’s all fine,” Pete would say, “then why does it hurt right where my heart is?” He always looked as if he’d asked some genius question that might finally stump the doc, but it never did. They’d usually just look at me to see if I could help them tell if he was joking, and I’d usually just roll my eyes and shake my head. What else can you do when you got a husband like that?
So, I ignored those snores that would lead up to his gasping and pretended he was awake, convincing myself that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep on account of thinking about last May. I scooted over in the bed towards him and tried to spoon. He grunted, snorted, and moved around until I finally rolled away onto my back again. I knew it was too hot to spoon, but I’d suddenly felt the need.
Maybe our mutt, Scamp, would come lay at my feet for a while. Scamp was some sort of weenie mix, but other than that, we had no clue. He had shaggy hair, but still shed all over the couch like it was his goddamn job, and was covered in these crazy black and white spots that really left us baffled about what had humped what. Cassidy called him “the long dog with the endless piebald side.” I’m still not too sure what the hell that means, even after she explained that it was a reference to some Stephen King book she’d read. Now, I’m not one to censor books—hell, it wasn’t until my generation that my family even learned to read—but I’d always felt uneasy about her reading stuff from him. She was an adult, though, so there wasn’t much I could do.
But the “long dog” was nowhere to be found right then. Not like having an extra body in the bed would make the muggy conditions any better, it was just that I suddenly felt edgy and craved a warm body to hold, even if it was a bastard dog like Scamp.
We all knew Scamp preferred Cassidy, partly, I suspected, because she walked him and fed him on a regular basis. Pete and I were never very good about that. Luckily, Scamp had gotten fat while Cass was away at school, so she only suspected that we hadn’t been walking him, and didn’t have a clue that we hadn’t really been feeding him. Turns out, dogs like being fed, so he loved her more than us and had taken to sleeping in her bed since she’d come home, instead of crowding me and Pete’s legs every night.
A faceless silhouette of him surfaced in my mind, and I had to cram it to the back of my brain. I didn’t know what he looked like, and that was a blessing. If I had a face to put to that silhouette, I might not have ever been able to keep him out of the front of my mind.
“See?” I whispered, careful not to wake Pete, “This is why you can’t be thinking about the summer. Or the future.”
I was suddenly very thirsty, but didn’t dare get out of bed. I couldn’t figure why, but I felt like complete chicken shit. Maybe I was just overtired. Or maybe it was that faceless picture of him that lingered in my mind.Of Cassidy’s him.
It’d been a while since he’dpenetrated my thoughts. I’d pretty much blocked him out within a few weeks after Cassidy had told us about him. There was no point letting myself get all obsessive about something we weren’t going to change. But now it seemed I’d opened Pandora’s box too late at night for my weak mind to stand a chance of closing it.
My stomach and chest clenched as a scene from the end of May popped into my head. I was suddenly back at the kitchen table, and Cass had just dropped her bombshell.
“Y’all are going to press charges, aren’t you?” she’d asked Pete and me.
I didn’t look up from the plastic tablecloth. I just stared at the goddamned picnic-blankety red-and-white-checkered pattern, absentmindedly tracing the lines with my finger.
“You want us to press charges?” I’d asked. I finally brought my eyes up to hers. “Don’t you think that would just make this whole thing drag out?”
I was sitting at the table with Cass, but Pete couldn’t get himself to sit down. He stood with one hand bracing on his hip and the other clutching his heart, which I suspect he thought was about to give out on him.
“How long ago did this happen?” he asked. He sounded angry, but I think both me and Cassidy recognized it for what it really was: horror.
“A few weeks ago. May fifth,” she said.
The hand on his hip flew up into the air in exasperation before landing on his forehead.
“Cinco de Mayo!” he said, outraged. “He did that to you on Cinco de Mayo!”
If there was something blasphemous about that, I sure didn’t catch on. But I reckon he would’ve shouted anything at that point.
“But Mom,” she continued, ignoring Pete, “we have to press charges. Otherwise he’ll just do the same thing to other girls and—”
I guess I caught whatever Pete had and started doing some yelling of my own. “Then let the other girls’ parents press charges!”
She should have been crying, but she wasn’t. I might’ve been crying if more of me was willing to admit that what she was saying was true, that it could actually happen to our girl.
Just because she’d gone off to college, survived lethal doses of alcohol during her freshman year, and become financially independent didn’t make her any less of our little girl, the same little girl who’d taken way too long to stop shitting her diapers.
“Listen, Cass, you’re over eighteen. We can’t do this for you. If you want to press charges, you can to do it for yourself,” I’d said once I’d calmed myself.
Pete seemed to agree with me, even though he shot me a look so dirty I thought I might never be able to clean myself of it.
That evening, while Pete and I sat in bed reading, Pete turned to me and told me that he planned on killing that son of a bitch if he ever found out who it was. I told Pete that that was probably why Cass wouldn’t give us a name. He said he didn’t care what he had to do to bribe a name out of her, he would find out who it was and kill him. I found myself reminding him that she was an adult, and we couldn’t protect her anymore. Even as the words escaped my mouth I wanted to scream. I knew it was bullshit, but what was worse was that I knew it was the only bullshit we could afford to live by.
The next morning at breakfast Pete asked me if we might want to find some professional help for Cass, maybe make her want to go back to college.
As always, Pete was putting me in the position of being the realist of the relationship. He knew damn well we didn’t have the money for that, and now I was going to have to be the one to seem cheap and heartless. Without even looking up from the newspaper want-ads, I gave him the answer he knew was coming. “And how are we going to afford that?”
It was cheap. It was heartless. But it was true.
We’d been living off savings and whatever high-interest credit cards we could get our hands on since Pete had lost his job at the Toyota plant. All we had was my part-time secretarial job, and that didn’t even cover our payments on the double-wide. Food stamps would be next and before too long.
We all knew that a psychologist was out of the question just like pressing charges was out of the question, and that reality made my gut feel like it was starting to rot.
“Stop thinking about it!” I said, pulling my mind back to the stuffy bedroom, fan off, Pete snoring. The fly in the blinds had stopped his frantic buzzing for a second, and I hoped he was finally dead.
It would be a relief for both of us, I thought, though I didn’t really know what I meant by that.
But the buzzing started again, and I knew it would’ve been too good to be true if the fly was dead so soon. It had a good three hundred more circles to complete before it’d served its sentence.
The buzzing repetition started to give me a headache, and soon I was feeling the full effects of motion sickness. Before much longer, I was fixing to spew.
I jumped up and ran to the bathroom, temporarily forgetting my fear of getting out of bed. I braced myself on the wood-paneled wall and stared into the toilet bowl, but all I could get out was some rusty-tasting spit. I stood there a second longer till I was sure nothing more would come up and wiped my mouth off with some toilet paper. But I didn’t flush it down. Flushing a toilet never seems like a good idea when you’re feeling edgy.
I avoided looking in the mirror and darted back to my bed, throwing the covers over me up to my chin. My heart was pounding. The silence wasn’t helping.
But it wasn’t silent for long.
I heard a sound coming from down the hall. At first I thought it might be the air conditioner grinding again, but I thought I’d turned it off that afternoon to avoid it getting more damaged before we could afford to hire a repairman. I considered getting Pete out of bed to check on it, but figured it would likely just turn itself off the minute he stood up.
But the noise didn’t stop. In fact, it got louder pretty quick, and it wasn’t too much longer before I realized what was making the sound: Scamp was growling at something. It sounded muffled coming out of Cassidy’s room, and I tried to think of what that damned mutt could be growling at this time of night, but my mind came up blank. A chilling fear tingled through my body as Scamp’s growling erupted into barking. But while the barking scared me, and even roused Pete’s groggy ass, I wouldn’t have been able to drag myself out of bed if it hadn’t been for the fact that Cassidy began screaming.
Not yelling, screaming.
As I flung open her bedroom door, Pete wasn’t more than a few steps behind me, and he, at least, had the sense to flip on the hall light, which shot into Cassidy’s room, falling on the end of the bed where Scamp was lunging straight at her, barking his head off like he’d gone mad.
Pete pushed me out of the doorway, ran into the room, and threw the dog off the bed so hard that I worried Scamp’s skull might be cracked from smacking into the wall. But the long dog was still conscious, though he stayed cowering on the ground, whimpering. I knew what I’d seen, but it didn’t make sense; Scamp wasn’t the type of dog to randomly attack someone, especially not Cass.
Cassidy was still hysterical, even as I sat down on the bed and put my arm around her.
When Scamp got off the ground and started towards the bed again, I saw a look on Pete’s face that said he wasn’t above murdering the family dog, but before he could take another swing, Cassidy interfered.
“It wasn’t Scamp,” she said.
“What wasn’t Scamp?” I asked.
“It wasn’t Scamp who attacked me.”
As soon as she’d said it, I saw Pete’s right hand fly up and clutch at his heart. I don’t know if it was his so-called heart problem or if he just felt the same way I did, like my heart was beating so hard that it might pop out of my chest.
Pete flipped on the bedroom light and sat down on the end of the bed, waiting just as impatiently as I was for Cassidy to muster the words to tell us what exactly was going on here. I don’t think Pete or me really wanted to hear what she had to say, but we were stuck.
In spite of the dread I felt numbing my brain, one of my dad’s old sayings popped into my head: “Just one of those times where you got to hold on to your ass and your wallet and hope for the best.”
“It was… nothing…” Cassidy said, and I had half a mind to let her leave it at that. But the screaming. People don’t scream like that at nothing.
“Was it a nightmare?” Pete prompted, obviously hoping for an explanation that we could laugh about in the morning.
Cass snapped her head up to face Pete, and I saw in those eyes a mixture of resentment and vulnerability that I’ll never forget.
“No, Dad. It wasn’t a nightmare.”
“Then what the hell was it?” he demanded.
I shushed him and motioned with my hand for him to take it down a notch.
Scamp pawed at the bed, and Cassidy patted the comforter, giving him the go-ahead to jump up and snuggle into her lap.
“It was sort of a man, I guess,” she said.
I felt all the muscles in my back clench as I took a quick look around the room, but I didn’t spot anyone.
Pete went a step further, checking inside her closet and behind her bedroom door.
“Well he’s not here anymore,” Pete said.
I wanted to hit Pete for acting the way he was. There was just no way that someone else could get in the house without us hearing him.
“Pete. Sit. Calm down,” I said.
“I swear someone was here, but he just disappeared. Don’t look at me like that, Mom. Listen, it was someone that was here, but at the same time not here—and no, Dad, it wasn’t a nightmare—and then I guess as soon as it heard you coming down the hall, he… it disappeared.”
She wasn’t making any sense to me, so I looked at Pete, trying to see what he made of it. I could tell he was prepared to believe every word that came out of her mouth.
I had a feeling I knew what this was really about, but also knew that I’d be alone in my thinking as long as Pete preferred Cassidy’s side to reality.
She needed a psychologist, I knew that much, but there was just no money for it. She’d just have to work this thing out for herself, and we’d just have to hold on to our ass and our wallet in the meantime.
The clock on her bedside table read 4:30 am, and I couldn’t believe just how long I’d been lying awake in bed, thinking about why Cassidy had moved back home. But had those memories not been fresh in my mind, I might’ve been almost as gullible as Pete, actually believing that Cassidy had seen whatever it was she claimed to have seen. But those memories were fresh, and I could connect the dots just as well as the next person.
So I said, “I’ll go put on some coffee, since I don’t see us getting anymore sleep tonight,” and left for the kitchen.
It wasn’t long before Pete came rushing into the kitchen, dragging Cassidy by the arm behind him.
“Look!” he said.
I turned around to see what I was supposed to be looking at, and he held out Cass’s forearm, pulling up her long sleeve to reveal a set of scratch marks.
“Look at these,” he said. “They’re fresh.”
They sure were.
I ran a finger lightly over one of them. I guess I was checking to make sure they were real. Cassidy flinched slightly at the touch.
“Looks like Scamp got you good there,” I said.
She jerked her sleeve back over them and tucked her arm behind her back.
“No. It wasn’t Scamp. I already told you that.”
I sat down at the kitchen table, finding myself entranced once again by the red-and-white-checkered pattern. I hadn’t been up this late since Cassidy was sick with the flu in first grade. Things started to wobble and blur out of the corners of my eyes.
“If it wasn’t Scamp, what was it then?” I asked. “Nothing else it could be.”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said, and with that, the conversation was over.
But there was still no going back to bed.
Pete put in a movie, and as he as Cass sat on the sofa and watched It’s a Wonderful Life, I stared out of the small kitchen window into the woods behind us. The rope from Cass’s old tire swing still dangled like a hangman’s noose from one of the trees. I’d been meaning to take it down for years, but things like that go by the wayside so easily. I guess part of me was still hoping that she’d ask us to put up another tire for her.
Soon as the coffee was ready, I brought Pete a cup. Cassidy was already asleep with Scamp curled up behind her knees, and we thought it was best if she stayed that way for a while.
I went back to my place at the window and stared at the old, limp rope as my mind fought off all the thoughts it could. One got through, though.
It was that damn fly.
I could still picture it buzzing back and forth between the window and the blinds. Maybe it’d somehow lucked out and blindly found its way through the slats. The question kept eating away at me until I had to go check to see.
I went into the bedroom and drew up the blinds.
The fly was dead on the sill.
I walked back towards the living room and stopped in the doorway.
“Pete,” I said. “This shit’s bound to keep coming round and round again.”
I don’t know if Pete heard me or not, because he didn’t say a thing and kept his eyes on the TV as Jimmy Stewart took to yelling at his perfect little family.
“She won’t find her own way out, Pete,” I said. “What can we do?”
He heard me that time.
“Nothing,” he said, unable to hide the bitterness in his voice. “We can’t do a damn thing. Not one goddamn thing.”
More than anything else that night, it was Pete’s matter-of-fact words that left me speechless.
I stood in that doorway for a long time, just leaning against the frame. As the movie finished, daylight began sneaking in through the living room window, casting stripes of shadow and light over Cassidy’s still body. I thought I’d help her stay asleep as long as she could, so I walked across the room and twisted shut the blinds, holding my breath as the beams of light thinned across her face before disappearing completely.