He tossed another butt out the window and took a quick glance towards Bella, who was snoozing in that little dog bed on the backseat.
The turn signal clicked back as he pushed the old green Subaru down the on ramp for I-95.
“Last stretch of highway, girl.”
Peter wasn’t sure if he was talking to Bella or the car.
~~~
“You know Peter, you don’t have to rush things. See where you’re at in a year.”
“Yeah, but you know we’ve thought about this and talked about it. I’m not sure we can put it off, it feels right. Ya know? Plus I’ve been living here my whole life. I think it might be time to try something different.”
“It’s only been a few months, Peter.”
Peter slows his pace. Bella sits snuggled in the pouch slung over his shoulder. He adjusts the pouch and straightens his back, while looking towards the display of birthday cards to his left.
Peter did most of his grocery shopping at Target and many times he’d invite his mother to join him. Target didn’t have everything when it came to groceries, but Peter had always enjoyed strolling through the aisles with Bella and Mom. They’d stop at Starbucks on the way in and then catch up as Peter grabbed the same familiar food items.
There were no groceries to pick up today however, just coffee and a chat.
Peter’s eyes drift back to his mother.
“I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not like we just met.”
~~~
Once upon a time Peter was a standout student athlete at Clarke County High School. However, he wondered, with the way things had unfolded that perhaps he was more remembered for his drunken shenanigans and bipolar episodes, then for his prowess on the soccer pitch and basketball court.
He didn’t like the feeling of blaming others for his struggles, he had learned that you must take responsibility for your own life. However, even now, deep down, there remained an inkling of a grudge.
Sometimes the thoughts still snaked their way up to the front of his mind. He’d given everything he had for his school, represented the Eagles with class. A three time State champion. Twice in soccer as the starting goalkeeper and once in Basketball.
He thought he’d done something to help his family become a true part of the Clarke County community. He figured it came down to politics in the end. His father Pat, with his long hair and scruffy beard, had claimed that when he moved the family from Maryland into the Shenandoah Valley, the democratic vote doubled in Clarke County. ‘Maybe that’s why we got fucked in the end’, Peter would contemplate. ‘Just the wrong politics.’
Pat was part of the technology department for the Clarke County School system, was teaching a new technology class at the high school, and was the Junior Varsity soccer coach. Funnily enough, the mother of Peter’s first girlfriend had offered Pat a job at the new high school in Winchester, called Millbrook. He would be the head Varsity soccer coach and again part of the technology department. Pat turned it down. He was committed to Clarke County, thought he’d retire as a teacher.
Pat would lose his job at Clarke County just as Peter was set to head to Radford University. There was nothing Pat could do, he wasn’t tenured.
Peter figured that was the beginning of the end. His mother may try to claim that it all went back to Pat’s infidelity years before. But Peter thought different. Not that he’d claim what his Dad did was forgivable, but it was only after the money got tight that his mother began talking about the affair.
It was the night before he left for Radford. They’d laid it on him at that going away party. Two drunk adults crushing a young man’s world. Pat was a great dad to Peter, but after his mother let him in on their secret, Peter began going inward, bottling his emotions, talking less to his father, unable to confront him. Worrying about his mother, worrying about his family, worrying about everything. Anxiety, depression, and finally psychotic mania would follow.
At the time Peter was unaware of his inner turmoil. It was a kind of dark place, a black hole, slowly devouring his being. You’d get glimpses of it escaping when Peter would drink heavily. And then that fateful night, the night of the van window, and the scar across his forehead that still remains.
Peter tries to ignore the thoughts when they resurface occasionally. He tries not to feel shame for his bipolar disorder. But there are still emotions attached to these intrusive thoughts.
What if Clarke County had shown them some love, not thrown them to the curb? What if Pat had kept his job, what if his mother hadn’t turned herself over to the booze, what if he’d never known that dark place?
Maybe that grudge will always live there underneath it all, and maybe Peter will never truly rid himself of this dark place, but every time that grudge carries those negative emotions up from the depths, Peter is reminded that things happen for a reason. He hates that saying, but he feels it all the same.
As Peter pushes the old Subaru up past 90 mph, flying past the tractor trailer to his right, he smiles at these thoughts. Had it all not happened the way it did, Peter and Pat would have surely never found themselves working together at Circuit City. If he’d never smashed his head through that window and succumbed to the dark place, he’d never have ended up meeting Judy in that psych ward. Well, maybe he could have gone without meeting Judy, but could he have gone without his dogs Lucy and Bella? Both of which Judy adopted. It was Lucy after all who ended his madness, and it is Bella who still keeps it from coming back. At least that’s how he sees it.
As he steers the Subaru back into the right hand lane and allows the car to slow to about 70 mph his smile drops a bit.
It’s afternoon, but the moon is visible in the distance ahead. It catches his eye and he sighs.
“Lucy, I love you girl.”
Bella’s ears perk up and she momentarily opens her eyes before snuggling her face into the corner of the dog bed.
It was worse than watching Dzedu get zipped up in that body bag, but looking back, both moments shared a similar quality. It’s as if both moments were frozen in high definition in Peter’s mind’s eye. The images clearer than the murkiness of most other memories.
Peter cracks the window and sparks the tip of his Lucky Strike.
“It’s an addiction Pete! Do you know that your aunt and uncle were able to afford a new car after they quit?”
Those were his Dzedu’s words.
As Peter takes a long drag from his cigarette his mind is rapidly flashing through time. It’d been almost 5 years since that last fall into psychosis, he no longer feared its return, but the memories, like a movie reel, returned with regularity.
It was March. Peter can’t remember the exact date, but sometimes, when the day comes around on the calendar again he thinks he can feel it. Lucy stopping in, to say hello from beyond this plane.
He’s walking through the Food Lion parking lot again, it’s dusk.
Peter has a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, Bella’s head poking out the top. Lucy, close at his side, a smile spread across her furry face.
“Is there anywhere you can go, anywhere I can take you?” The woman had asked.
He didn’t think he could go back. But he almost answered yes. Almost.
“Maybe just a ride up to the park,” is what he did say.
He’d been wandering through Culpeper, Virginia with the dogs for three or four days. Hiding in the park at night, sleeping in the grass or the public bathroom. Wandering, searching for half burned cigarettes tossed along his path.
It’d been the cigarette that pushed him up the sidewalk during morning rush hour. It was on his mind when Lucy darted away from his side.
She was so fast, so quickly under the tire of the delivery truck.
The scream he let out came from deep within his soul, a part of it perhaps leaving him forever.
Peter keeps the Subaru cruising within the lines, he knows the image can’t be kept at bay. It floats up with a quickness and Peter lets it come. In a way he wants to look, in a way he knows he must.
Her light brown and black markings, her soft shaggy fur, her smile ruined, her left eye dangled far from its home. Peter picked Lucy up from the blacktop and wrapped her in the blanket from his bag.
He held her. He could feel the last bits of her leaving this world.
Peter and Bella approach their exit.
He manages to smile again. He’s not sure what would have come of him had Lucy not sprinted to her death. As he laid her down in that grassy field, reality seemed to return somewhat, the veil of psychosis lifted just enough. Lucy’s death crushed him, the guilt, a spear through his heart.
As he steers the Subaru down the exit ramp towards his destination in Bluffton, South Carolina, he whispers, “Thank you, Lucy.”
This was a tough one to read, evocatively written. Dogs always get me.
This was raw & real