“Don’t do this, Gerard. Please—”
“I know. Pitiful, huh?”
They didn’t even realize they had run a red light until the car braked suddenly and they lurched forward in unison. A station wagon roared through the intersection, the man in the driver’s seat mouthing curses while two girls stared with their mouths curved into startled Ohs! and their palms pressed against the glass of the rear window. Cedric swerved to avoid hitting them and ran into a telephone pole. There was a loud crash and a hubcap popped off and rolled into the street. For a moment, the car sat stranded on the sidewalk, blanketed by a cloud of smoke kicked up by screeching brakes.
Cedric struggled to lift his head. He could feel blood gushing from his nose, spilling into his open mouth. When he opened his eyes, Gerard was still sitting next to him, a nasty gash on his forehead. There was blood running down the side of his face, spilling onto the front of his shirt. He looked like someone had just beaten the shit out of him. But he was still holding the gun.
“Now let’s go see Shaun,” Gerard said.
Marked
by Gale Massey
Pinellas Park
Callie stood at home plate in the first inning of the game, hoping for the right pitch, when she heard the crash. A breeze rustled the palm trees out past the left field fence. Overhead the sunset had turned the sky purple. The crowd in the bleachers fell silent waiting for the metal-against-metal screech to stop, but it went on so long that everyone knew it had been deadly. The dugout emptied onto the field, the players and coaches stood facing south where the train crossed Park Boulevard, even though that intersection was a quarter mile away and blocked from view by city hall and none of them could see a thing. Pinellas Park had been built after the railroad, and the tracks ran through the small town at a foolish angle. Callie rested the bat on her shoulder and scrunched up her face, but that thing people talk about, how you know in your gut someone close to you has died? That part never happened. After the game resumed the lights on the field came on, she swung at a fast ball, and was out. By the last inning her granddad had arrived to tell her the news.
It never dawned on her that her parents might’ve been in that car. They had said they wanted a few minutes alone and dropped her off at the field promising to be right back. It seemed they were always trying to get a few minutes alone, a thing she doesn’t understand even now, two years later. The three of them were always happy enough, riding in the pickup with Callie squeezed between them, her father’s arm stretched behind her back, playing with a lock of her mother’s hair.
Burial expenses wiped out the equity on their small cinder-block house, so it went back to the bank. Her granddad, the town’s widowed preacher, insisted on a four-foot-tall family headstone, had it installed beneath the ancient moss-draped oak at the grave of his long-dead wife, and bought two silk-lined mahogany caskets. Nothing less, he claimed, would serve the memory of his son. Callie saw the reasoning there, but when Granddad paid for three plots, one for each of her parents and one for himself, it bothered her. The old man explained that when she grew up she’d have a husband, and when she died she’d have to be buried next to him, but it was a man and a situation Callie already knew would never exist.
On the day of the funeral the crowded church was sweltering beneath the Florida sun. Halfway through delivering his son’s eulogy, her granddad had a stroke that nearly killed him. He never walked again and soon his ability to speak vanished. He went into the retirement home two blocks from the high school, and Callie went into a foster care group home. But in a town that was Little League crazy, the half-grown girl never got noticed by families looking to adopt.
The sudden upheaval in her life was a shock, though a well-meaning counselor at family services stepped in to teach her how to manage the anxiety that consumed her. The better help came from a large bottle of small blue pills that the house manager gave her at intervals throughout the day and whenever she asked for another. The pills helped her breathe on bad days. On other days they kept her from biting her nails to the quick. The first year after the train wreck passed without lodging itself in her memory. She went through the motions of brushing her teeth and eating, but her mind was always at home plate, the bat resting on her shoulder, listening to the screeching metal.
With help from the pills two years crept by so slowly that her memory seemed like a movie about some other girl and some other family. After another year Callie couldn’t trace herself back to a moment when she wasn’t sliding toward panic. Approaching a window caused a small jolt of adrenaline to burst in her stomach. A door could leave her paralyzed. The house manager kept an eye on her, took her shopping sometimes at the Dollar Store at the strip mall in town just for the distraction of stocking up on household goods. Callie hated shopping. The store added dimension to the world when what she craved was something that would make it smaller. Shelf after shelf of canned and boxed food. Where did it all come from? Who had touched it? Had they washed their hands? Everyone knew about tampering, how it happened all the time.
Opening jars was the worst. Wondering what some stranger might have put in the applesauce or toothpaste. Anything could be tainted, especially products from the Dollar Store where the poor people shopped, yet the house manager refused to waste money across town at the more expensive Winn-Dixie. Callie stayed awake at night worrying that the food from supper had been contaminated by a disgruntled worker on a production line, amused at the thought of killing a stranger on the other side of the country. Callie took to slitting the tube to get the toothpaste out of the bottom. She’d use it a few times and throw it out, count herself lucky each time she survived. Eventually she stopped using it altogether because the counselor told her it was good to trust her intuition, and her intuition made her suspicious of Dollar Store toothpaste.
On the really bad days, when even four pills didn’t help, she used matches. She kept a pack with her because some days just holding the matchbook was enough, on other days the smell of sulfur was enough. On really, really bad days she had to feel the burn. The burn turned her mind white. It told her she was strong and had nothing to hide from because in the middle of a burn the only choice was to endure.
A girl at school had asked if she wanted to see a match burn twice and Callie had been intrigued. The girl struck the match, blew it out, and touched it to Callie’s arm. She screamed as white light exploded behind her eyes.
The girl laughed and said, “Make your mark or the world will make it on you.”
Callie saw her point. Right then she decided to make her own marks — a strip of burn scars down the inside of her arm.
The burn hit the back of her head first and wiped her mind clean. Nothing else existed while her head was lit up like that. The counselor noticed the scars. She made a note on Callie’s chart and suggested she trade softball for basketball. The next day a new prescription showed up and was added to her morning medication. Callie studied the new pill. It was solid and harder to swallow and sometimes got lodged sideways in her throat and hurt until it dissolved.