Tell Andy if he wants his knife back, he’s going to have to come and get it.
Callie wasn’t a complete Luddite. She knew cars gave off signals to GPS satellites that told people exactly where they were. She knew Sidney’s ridiculously expensive BMW would act as a giant neon sign, pointing Andrew to her location. She also knew several hours had passed since Andrew had been released from his jury selection.
So why hadn’t he come for her?
Callie grabbed a surgical pack on her way to the breakroom. Her leg was aching so much that she was limping by the time she reached the table. She gently placed one little and one big vial on the table. She opened up the surgical pack. Her hand went to her thigh as she sat down. The abscess in her leg felt like a robin’s egg under her jeans. She pressed into it, because the physical pain was better than the pain she was feeling inside.
She closed her eyes. She stopped her brain’s fight against the inevitable and let the video play in her head.
Callie’s fourteen-year-old self trapped on the couch.
Buddy, please, it hurts too much please stop please …
Buddy’s enormous body grinding into her.
Shut the fuck up Callie I said hold the fuck still.
She hadn’t remembered it that way. Why hadn’t she remembered it that way? What was wrong with her brain? What was wrong with her soul?
At the snap of her fingers, Callie could relay in intricate detail ten thousand horrible things that Phil had done when Callie was little, whether it was beating her unconscious or abandoning her on the side of the road or scaring the shit out of her in the middle of the night because the tinfoil hat men were waiting outside with their probes.
Why was it that Callie had never, ever in the last twenty-three years let herself recall how many times Buddy had threatened her, thrown her across the room, kicked her, forced himself inside of her, tied her up, even strangled her? Why had she blocked the memories of the ten thousand times he’d told Callie that it was her fault because she cried too much or begged too much or couldn’t do all of the things that he wanted her to do?
Callie heard the smack of her lips. Her brain had drawn a direct line from Phil to Buddy to the locked drug cabinet.
Methadone. Ketamine. Buprenorphine. Fentanyl.
She had picked up her backpack at Phil’s when she’d changed out of the slinky black top and into her torn Care Bears T-shirt and yellow satin rainbow jacket. She’d snapped the front up to her neck because it felt safer that way, almost like a security blanket. Callie’s dope kit was inside the backpack. Her tie-off. Her lighter. Her spoon. A used syringe. A fat baggie filled to the top with off-white powder.
Without thinking, she was reaching down. Without a thought, she was opening the kit, her muscle memory laying out the lighter, the tie-off, the fat baggie with its unknowable mysteries.
The dealer who’d sold her the heroin wasn’t someone Callie knew. She had no idea what he’d cut it with—baking soda, powdered milk, meth, fenty, strychnine—or even how pure the drug was when he’d started. What had mattered at the time was that she had forty dollars and some prescription pills left over from her debacle with Sidney and he’d had enough heroin to kill an elephant.
Callie swallowed the blood in her mouth. Her lip was bleeding because she could not stop biting it. With effort, she managed to pull her attention away from the dope. She leaned up in the chair so that she could slide down her jeans. In the overhead light, her thigh was the color of Elmer’s glue, if you dropped a bright red, pus-filled glob at the top. She gently brushed her fingers along the abscess. Heat pulsed into her fingertips. There were dried specks of blood where she had injected herself through the infection.
All for less than five minutes of a high that she was never, ever going to catch again no matter how many times she chased it.
Fucking junkies.
She drew back a few ccs of lidocaine, not bothering to measure the dose. She watched the needle dip into the abscess. Another trickle of blood rewarded the effort. There was no pinch of pain because everything in her body hurt right now. Her neck, her arms, her back, her kneecap that she’d drilled into Sidney’s crotch. The heavy feeling from the heroin that used to lull Callie into a senseless sleep had turned into a weight that was going to eventually smother her.
She closed her eyes as she felt the lidocaine spreading through the abscess. She listened for the gorilla. Strained to feel his hot breath on her neck. The loneliness was stark. She had lived with the threat of him stalking on the horizon since that night in the kitchen, but now, there was nothing. The creature had disappeared inside the stadium tunnel a few moments before she had attacked Andrew. The puzzle of that paradox would not stop nagging at Callie’s brain. If she pushed to the edges of the equation, the solution was simple: all of these years, Buddy Waleski had not been the gorilla.