Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

“You better get used to this, Sanchez,” Wallert huffed. He dragged himself to his feet. In the huge, bare living room, the man stood above her while Vizchen drove his knee into her back.

“If you take this house,” Wallert said, unbuckling his belt, “someone’s going to be here every goddamn night. Tapping at the windows. Ringing the doorbell. Smashing through the back gate. I’ll bring a fucking special response team down on you, Sanchez. I’ll bring them down on every family in every house on this street. They’ll drive you out of here with pitchforks.”

He unzipped his fly, and for a moment Jessica’s body seized in terror, every joint locking, her mouth snapping shut, and her eyes bulging against the dark. She had a piercing vision of Wallert grinding on top of her, his hand around her throat, his thighs slapping against hers, Vizchen nearby, watching, waiting his turn. A camera phone recording. And then, in an instant, the fantasy had morphed into something more real, not a vision but a memory. The soft carpet beneath her was the cold concrete floor of 4699 Lonscote Place. The suspect. His slobbering, drug-slack mouth wrapping around her bicep, his teeth clamping down. Impossible strength. A bite on her shoulder, deeper this time, tearing. It was almost a relief to shake herself back into the impending double rape.

But she heard the sound of liquid pattering on the carpet, and her horror-blindness cleared to show her Wallert not climbing on top of her but standing and pissing in the middle of the living room. She watched while he emptied himself, hips rotating this way and that, piss foaming on the cream wool, Vizchen’s body on top of hers jittering while he laughed. She lay flat against the floor as they left, too mortified to do anything else.

In time a blessed breeze, sea air stroking its way through the city toward the mountains, came and lifted the stench of Wallert’s piss out of the room and through the smashed back window.

Jessica was sitting with her feet in the pool again. She had only just stopped shivering when she heard the boy climbing the lattice, the characteristic “Oof!” that announced his landing.

“I heard glass smashing,” he said as he rounded the pool fence. He stood looking back at the house, gripping the glass. “What happened? Did you have an accident?”

“Don’t your parents wonder about you sneaking around in the middle of the night?”

“They’re having people over for dinner.” He waved dismissively at the fence. “They think I’m playing my Nintendo.”

The wind was warm. Jessica wondered if the boy could smell the urine carried on the air, or if the smell just lingered in her nostrils, a part of her for the indeterminable future. She beckoned him and he came. She stepped down the stairs, the cool water rising up over where her jeans were pushed up to her knees. She put out a hand and the boy stepped back.

“No way,” he said. “I told you, I can’t swim.”

“Come on,” she said.

“My clothes will get wet. Your clothes are getting wet!”

“Live a little, kid,” she said.

It was all he needed. The kid stepped down into the water, slowly at first, then launched himself at her, thin arms grabbing at her neck and shoulders. For an instant she felt the arms of her attacker at Lonscote Place, the brutal embrace of Vizchen, and then she was back in the moment again, just a woman struggling with a panicked boy in a pool. His floundering brought a smile to her face. She turned him over, hooking her arms under his.

“Look at the sky,” she said. “Relax. I’ve got you.”

“This is crazy,” the boy was huffing. “I’m gonna drown. I’m gonna die. I’m dead. I’m dead!”

“You’re not gonna drown,” Jessica said. “You’ve got this.”

She walked backward through the water, dragging him gently along, their arms locked. The bones in his ribcage swelled as he gulped air, the water pooling around his face.

“I’m going to teach you how to float,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. Everybody floats. Arch your back. Stick your belly up. Higher. Higher. Stick your butt up. Lift your chin and just look at the stars. I’m not going to let go of you.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Really promise though!”

“I do,” she laughed. “I do.”

She wandered. Jamie watched the stars. Guilt and comfort swirled in Jessica. She had grabbed the child and forced him into a difficult position, taken control, so that she could have something more vulnerable than herself to play with, to take her mind off what had just happened to her. To make her feel strong again. If the boy hadn’t been around, she might have reached for anything: a stray cat, some lonely deadbeat sitting in a bar. Anything would do. She wanted to see fear in something else’s eyes, to know she was not alone. She wanted to watch that fear dissipate. The boy in her hands laughed, bringing her back.

“I’m floating.”

“Put your arms out.”

He spread his arms and legs, giggling, his strangely round belly protruding from the surface of the water. In the blue light it seemed like a taut, smooth island of spotless sand.

“What happened to your arm?” he asked. Jessica looked. The sleeve of her T-shirt had been pushed up over the ring of bite marks in her upper arm.

“Dog bite.”

“Whoa! A police dog?”

“No, just a normal dog.”

“Like a Labrador?”

“Does it really matter?”

“Why did the dog bite you?”

“It was crazy.”

“Crazy how?”

“Just concentrate, would you?”

She slipped her arms out from under his and held the back of his head, pulling him gently along.

“Don’t let me go!”

“I’m not what’s holding you up, kid. I’ve just got your head in my hands. That’s it. Look.”

She dropped her hands. The boy floated on his own, drifting slowly away from her like a child-shaped log, silently at first, then giggling again. His laughs made ripples in the pool and the island of his belly quake.

“I can do this!” he told the stars.

“Seems so,” Jessica replied.