The Past Ahead of Us

This is fiction.

1

“That’s why movies like Fern Gully were so damaging to environmental consciousness for our generation.”

Warm desert wind comes through the cracked car windows. Our headlights point west toward the distant hills. Sonic Youth are working their way through “Pipeline/Kill” on the cassette player, generously filling the silence as I look for the right response. I settle on a playfully dismissive laugh and turn my head toward the passenger seat to make sure it’s well delivered.

“No, seriously!” Billy played along with predictable incredulity.

When I was a kid, I watched Fern Gully until the VHS became practically useless. I remember the oil monster. What was his name? Tim Curry played him in that characteristically masterful way that only Tim Curry can play a villain. The memory elicits a subtle bit of nostalgia and transports me momentarily from the monotonous desert plains to a vibrant Disney rainforest.

“It’s such a dangerous message,” Billy continued her verbal essay. “Take Hexxus, for example.” Hexxus, that was his name. “By making a villain of this generic oil blob, giving him sentience, the writers completely absolved capitalist interests of all their fault in deforestation and exploitation of resources, of…” Billy stumbled. “…of indigenous communities!”

No one is right, nothing is solid, Sonic Youth playfully punctuate Billy’s point with their coda.

“And it reinforced this attitude that continues to this day for people our age.”

I hate it when she says that. I’m only 34, not a fucking grandpa just yet. Besides, she’s two years older than me.

“We think we can just turn off the lights when we leave a room and the rainforests will be fine. It’s okay, consume as much as you want, just recycle and it’ll all be fine. This bullshit Captain Planet mentality, you know what I mean. The polar bears will live happy, long lives, and all you have to do is clean up litter if you see it.”

Sonic Youth reaches the end of their A side. The cassette clicks and ejects.

“I think Fern Gully deserves some credit for opening the conversation,” I counter. “I mean, I was younger than you when it was released and I’m not exactly complacent about the crisis, you know? That early-90s wishy-washy environment crap opened our eyes in a way, then we evolved to a higher understanding about the real criminals in the equation.”

“Typical, you take Hexxus’s side.”

I laugh, but this time genuinely and without the dismissiveness. Billy smiles.

A few seconds pass in silence. I watch the road, lean against the driver’s side door, left elbow rested at its base and fingers tickling the air coming through the crack at the top. Billy drops her feet from the dashboard and pulls from below her seat a shoebox with some loose, unsorted cassettes.

“Dangerous?” she asks, pulling Michael Jackson from the box.

“Not quite right, is it?” I reply, setting her back to the search. “We could listen to the B side.”

“We’ve been over this. I can’t listen to the B side.”

Sister was one of the few cassettes we had when we set out from Freeport. She sorted through the stack as we drove south through Portland and gave me her review of every Sonic Youth song. For Billy, Sister‘s A side is so strong that the B side feels like a letdown. A “bad breakup” to a good relationship is the metaphor she used. “We can at least listen to ‘Pacific Coast Highway’ when we reach California, right?” I sought to compromise. “A little too on-the-nose, Lev.”

The intermittent and random clicking of the cassettes makes my eyes heavy. I look at the clock on the dashboard. 2:37. I regret not looking at the clock when we left the motel, but we agreed it would be roadtrip rule one. We would set out at sunrise and check in with sunset, or at the closest lodging we can find after sunset, and never, under any circumstances, would we look at the clock at either of those events. Sunrise must have been around 5:00 or so. We had spent about an hour eating fruit and Clif bars outside Spooner Summit, and stopped at a diner somewhere along the way for lunch, so less those two hours. Just as I start to add it together, Billy finds something.

“Willie.” She says confidently.

At this point, Face of a Fighter is practically worn to shreds. We picked it up along the way at a garage sale in Indiana, then repeated it ad infinitum through Illinois. I wouldn’t ever want to disrespect Willie, but the thought of his crooning in this desert heat gives me some serious concern about how close I am to falling asleep at the wheel.

“Hey, maybe we can just sit with Sister for a bit?” I ask, hopefully.

Billy shrugs and returns the shoebox under the seat. I hear her sniff a few times, catch her twitching her shoulder as she sinks back into the seat and puts her feet back on the dashboard.

The sniffing tic is something she’s been doing since she went clean a little over a year ago. This roadtrip was a reward for her first year of sobriety, a celebration for the both of us, and, with any luck, the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. But no matter how much we tried to look forward, that tic always reminds me of how dark things got for her — for all of us, really — after that night. Of the four of us, J got off easiest. He was shot by a home intruder at his uncle’s house in Boston and died on the coach. The paramedics told us it was quick.

A gas station breaks the horizon and rescues me from a flashback. “Finally,” I say, embarrassed by how relieved I am.

“I have to pee,” Billy says. I’m embarrassed no longer.

“Yeah we’ll stop.”

On the flat desert road, the gas station proves farther than it appears. We pull in upon finally reaching it, park next to the only other car here, and drop our tired legs to the hot pavement. A stretch possesses me for a brief moment and my arms rigidly squirm toward the sky. I adjust my shirt and start moving toward the entrance, joined by Billy at the front of the car.

As the automatic doors open, a blast of cold air hits us hard, envelopes us, and pulls us in. The smell of stale coffee and industrial cleaning fluids stings our noses, a violent contrast with the dry desert air. Billy makes a beeline for the toilet. I grab a basket and start scavenging for snacks.

Billy’s vegan, and I’m flexible, so I’ve developed a habit since Freeport of starting with the potato chips. They’re easy. I drop a few bags into the cart and start carefully studying the ingredients list on some generic energy bars. Honey? No. Chocolate chips? Obviously not.

A minute or so passes in this way before Billy breaks me from my concentration. “Lev?” she asks gently.

Glycerin. That’s pigs, right?

“Uh huh?” I ask, eyes still fixed to the back of a label.

“Lev!” she says again, this time with urgency.

I turn my head to meet her. Her face is white, jaw slacking. I cycle through a few emotions. Did I do something? Did she do something?

She slowly thrusts a newspaper forward and glances sheepishly over my shoulder in the direction of the cash register. I follow her stare and spend a moment observing the cashier, a soft-looking teenager resting his head on his chin and enjoying some sleep. His hat is crooked and barely fitted atop dirty blond curls that reflect the fluorescent lights with a smooth, greasy sheen.

I return my gaze to Billy, then to the newspaper in her hand. Reluctantly, I grab the paper and loosen it from her grip. My eyes scan the front page. “Construction begins on controversial pipeline.” That can’t be what’s got Billy so scared. “Lawmakers reject school funding expansion.” I grow impatient.

“What, what am I looking at?”

Billy flips the paper. The words fly from below the fold, piercing me. “Suspect detained in 2014 Montana murder.”

I’m suddenly overcome by excruciating exhaustion and fight to stay on my feet. Seconds feel like minutes as I look for my breath. I notice rationalizations and reassurances spilling from some primitive part of my mind dedicated to self-preservation. It’s probably some other case. Even if it’s your case, he won’t talk. He wouldn’t. Even if he does, you could get off Route 50, make your way south to Mexico. The rationalizations and reassurances are meaningless, but I let them do their magic and massage breath back into my lungs.

“Okay,” I say to comfort Billy and to convince her, and myself, that I know what to do.

2

Suspect detained in 2014 Montana murder
Las Vegas Globe
Emily Paul, Darryl Houghton

The Missoula Police Department has detained a suspect in the murder of Betty Winchester, a local woman whose body was found in Glacier National Park in July 2014.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Missoula Sheriff Jon Steele indicated the suspect is cooperating with the Department’s investigation, which has been reopened based on this development.

“We are hopeful that with the suspect’s cooperation, we can finally bring to a close this painful chapter for the Winchester family,” said Sheriff Steele.

Mrs. Winchester, who was 68 at the time of her disappearance, was a beloved member of the community. Her disappearance devastated many Missoulans, who had come to know her through her philanthropy and volunteer work with youth rehabilitation centers throughout the state. She was survived by her husband, William Winchester, and daughter, Mary.

In August 2015, after more than a year without progress, investigators reported the case inconclusive. Since then, the circumstances of Ms. Winchester’s death have remained a mystery.

“It just makes me angry,” said one Missoula high schooler who had known Mrs. Winchester through her volunteer work in response to an interview on the one-year anniversary. “I hope they find who did it, because Grandma Winchester was one of the best people.”

In a written response to a request for more information about the suspect, a Department spokesperson indicated the suspect’s anonymity is being maintained in the interest of preserving the integrity of the investigation.

William and Mary Winchester did not respond to requests for a statement.

3

“Dude, you are so wrong about this,” J said, feigning anger. Or maybe he was really angry. It was never easy to tell with him. “Shredder was the bad guy, Splinter was the rat, one-hundred-percent,” J explained indignantly.
Caleb laughed him off.

We had decided to rent a house in Missoula for the summer for the change of scenery. It was a small deal downtown, but it had a lawn, and that was more than any of us could say about our places back in Maine.

The voices of crickets welcomed night’s slow approach as living rooms up and down the street lit up in random sequence. I threw another log in the firepit and stood up.

“I’m dry. Y’all need another one?” I asked, shaking my beer. Y’all. I caught myself every time I said it, but it was an unshakable habit. A complex really. In Portland, I can pretend that I’m not from the south. It’s a survival technique that helps me get along better with my New England clique. But whenever I was anywhere remotely rural, I was like Howdy fucking Doo, all “y’all” this and “yessir” that.

“You don’t even have to ask, man, just bring a fresh round.”

The walk from the fire pit to the back door was a long 15 feet. I breathed deep, looked up to check the progress of the stars’ emergence. I thought about how nice it would be to stay here forever. I could quit my shit job back east and try something new. I thought about the ways my life could have turned out differently had I made better decisions.

These existential questions faded as I walked inside and started toward the refrigerator. The breeze carried laughter through the kitchen window and sobered me for a moment. I felt a sudden impatience to get back to the fire, so I moved my feet more quickly toward the refrigerator and opened the door.

The refrigerator had all the provisions you would expect four broke 30-somethings to have stocked — peanut butter, bread, a couple of apples. But something important was missing. We had finished off the beer.

Beer run, I whispered, ordering myself to rally up for it.

When I stepped back into the yard, all was quiet but for the snapping of logs in the fire pit. Billy dragged from a cigarette and exhaled upward like a chimney stack, pondering the shapes of the smoke clouds. The warm orange light of the fire illuminated J and Caleb’s faces.

“Who’s up for a beer run?” I asked hopefully.

It took a moment for Billy, J, and Caleb to process the question. Then, as if skipping a few important intermediate parts of conversation, Billy flicked her cigarette into the fire, stood, and declared, “Let’s head out.” J and Caleb slowly lumbered to their feet as though they were shadowing Billy, and the four of us left the back yard.

We were tired but buoyant, both potent, lingering effects of the alcohol. He had become our habit to begin drinking in the early afternoon this summer. We paced ourselves and treated the drink like a kind of self medication. Being here made time less tyrannous, and as a result there was no pressure to make ourselves feel too good, too fast. So many nights in Portland ended badly when that pressure was present. No, our relationship with the bottle was healthier here in a way.

We walked along the uneven sidewalk. A dog occasionally barked in the distance. Street lights cast our shadows onto lawns, onto street pavement. None of us spoke.

After ten minutes or so, halfway to the liquor store, Caleb pulled the gun from his belt strap. It seemed like a standard pistol, to the extent that I knew anything about guns. It was heavy in the hand but easy to hold. Stopping at a gun show was kind of a joke, and the punchline was Caleb buying the gun without even giving over his name. We took turns shooting it in the backwaters on days we weren’t occupied with drinking or hiking. Caleb had a particular attraction to it. He said it made him feel free, and he had taken to carrying it around — that’s easy to do in Montana, where a permit is only necessary for concealed carry.

Caleb had taken a liking to fucking around with the gun. He would twirl it like the sheriff in some Spaghetti Western and toss it from hand to hand. He found some kind of foreign joy in it.

The sound of a dog barking in the distance drew Caleb’s attention away from the gun for a moment and toward a grassy lawn. We all turned our heads to see a jackrabbit racing across the grass, a flash of brown in the half-light. Caleb raised the gun in a kind of silly way, a poor imitation of some B-grade actor’s modestly more convincing imitation of a cop or a soldier. “Gotcha,” we heard him whisper. A crack broke through the night and we all froze.

As our awareness returned, Caleb looked most frightened of us all. “Oh shit,” he said, jaw hanging and eyes wide. “I thought the safety was on.” He held the gun loosely in his right hand and the barrel swept our feet clumsily.

“Watch it with that thing,” Billy half-yelled. “Why the fuck is it even loaded?”

I felt my heart beating hard and fast. My knees and hands shook as adrenaline made its way through my limb. My mouth was dry. Was that the liquor or the nerves? Probably the latter, given that the gun had chased the buzz away.

“Dude, it’s cool, I’ll put it away.” Caleb shoved the gun back into his belt.

As Caleb sought to defuse the situation, I heard a sound like branches scraping over a roof or sandpaper making splinters of smooth wood. Billy heard it too, I guessed, as she put our her arm to stop us from getting back on course.

“What?” J asked.

“Shh, just shut up for a second,” Billy ordered, and we all complied.

I heard the sound again. It was growing louder as the ringing in my ears subsided.

“Oh shit,” I heard J whisper. Then again, “Oh shit,” over and over.

In the direction of the rabbit, I saw a smooth white figure against the grass, reflecting the light of a bright half moon. It moved in short, shallow waves. I rejected the obvious observation that it was a person until it was no longer possible to conclude it was anything but.

Billy ran over first. We watched her fall to her knees and cradle the figure in her arms. I was the first to follow, joining Billy on the cool soil.

I looked at the bundle in Billy’s arms and saw a woman’s face. It was hard to make out in the weak light, but it was clearly an older woman. I felt my body tremble as I looked over her. Blood was draining from a hole in her neck, a dark stain on white skin and linen. Her eyes were darting about weakly under half-closed eyelids.

“We have to help her,” Billy said. J and Caleb paced a few feet behind us. “We have to help her,” Billy repeated.

“Oh my god, are you kidding me?” Caleb protested. “We can’t, I can’t.” The argument hung in the air between us.

I grew impatient watching life drain from the woman. We were too late, that much was obvious. But we couldn’t stay here and do nothing. “J, go get the car,” I said.

After a short silence, J took off sprinting. I watched his figure disappear into the night, then turned back to Billy. Her face was still and expressionless as she watched the old woman. I said her name, but she didn’t respond. “Billy,” I said again, more urgently. “We have to move her behind the bushes.” She said nothing as she released the old woman’s head from her arms. The old woman sank into the grass, now vacant of all life, now just a body.

Billy gripped the body at the arms and readied to move. I grabbed the ankles and did the same. “Watch for J,” I said in Caleb’s direction. Maybe he heard me, maybe not, but he stayed fixed by the sidewalk and that was good enough.

The body was light and we made quick work of the task. Billy and I sat in the bushes, waiting for a sign that we were clear to move. I lived a thousand lives in my mind, each more outlandish than the last, until I was brought back to earth by Caleb’s voice.

I peeked out to see J and Caleb arguing at the car, lights off. I motioned to Billy that it was time, and we moved the body to the car. When we reached J and Caleb, I circled to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and pulled out a blue tarp to wrap the body. J and I lifted the loose bundle and put it into the trunk. We took no time to clean the lawn or do anything you might expect from more professional killers. J lowered himself back into the driver’s seat. Caleb rode shotgun, and Billy and I climbed into the back. Like that, we were off.

Artifacts of our summer were scattered on the backseat — sand, Polaroids, and a few pairs of sandals, all reminders of a life now passed, a life we could never return to. Images collided in my head. I saw Caleb yelling at Billy and J for wasting a bag of M&Ms in a food fight somewhere in Ohio. I saw a steady stream of crimson pouring ceaselessly from an open wound. I saw the border of Maine disappear in the rearview mirror as we pointed our car southward on a humid morning in June. I saw a cold, lifeless chest under a floral-patterned gown. I felt the synapses in my head cementing all of these images into one category, my summer in Montana, and the memories becoming inseparable from one another.

We took the 93 up toward Kalispell, then pulled off around Flathead Lake to stay local and avoid other cars. The roads were featureless. The mountains of Glacier National Park were shadows against the night sky. J pulled over when we reached Swan Lake, where we dumped the body and sat silent until the sun rose.

The drive back to Missoula was the last time the four of us were together. Billy left us at an exit ramp on 93 and hitchhiked back to Maine. J called his uncle in Boston and asked if he could stay for awhile, then took a bus back east from Missoula. Caleb was in some kind of paralysis, and stayed in the Missoula house simply for his inability to decide anything else. I stayed with him for one night, and took the car to Canada the next day.

4

We make our way quietly out the convenience store and back to the car. I toss the paper and a shopping basket into the back seat, not fully present. We climb back in, leave the parking lot, and point the car west again.

I catch myself nodding off at the wheel as the car picks up pace. This is always my response to high stress, a Pavlovian legacy of my mom’s drunk boyfriend. He loved to hit me, but I learned through experience that it didn’t give him much of a thrill when I was asleep. So, I trained myself to sleep when stress was bearing down on me, and it haunts me today, in the desert heat, on the Loneliest Road.

Billy is motionless until we reach 65 mph. She turns to the back seat and I hear her rustling through potato chip bags impatiently, aggressively. My hands stay obediently at 10 and 2.

The sound of rubbish rustling stops and Billy snaps back into the passenger seat. I keep my eyes forward, observing her in my peripheral vision as she studies the paper. Her breath is shallow and fast.

“Cooperating with the investigation,” Billy softly whispers, half questioning, and the words navigate the sound of the wind and the heavy air between us.

I fumble around in the vacuum of my mind for the right response and eventually find some optimism to calm the situation. “It’s not so bad, we –”

“Not bad? Caleb was always the one we had to worry about. I had an escape, you had your fucking righteous pedestal as the one who took charge and cleaned it up, and J didn’t live long enough to process the guilt. Fucking Caleb.”

I’m lost again. We’re lost. 10 and 2, eyes forward.

“Pull over,” Billy demands after the car hums along for another three or four-hundred feet. I obey, pulling the car to a steady stop on the dusty shoulder.

Billy jumps out, runs in front of the car, and falls on her knees. I hear her vomiting and resist, for just a short time, the urge to go to her. I finally give in, grab a water bottle from the cup holder, and exit the car to help. Billy holds the back of her hand to her mouth. A few tears wash the dust from her cheeks, mingling with sweat along the way, and eventually watering the dry earth below. I offer Billy the water and she drinks deeply.

“Listen, all we know is that the police are looking into it. We’ve been through it before, we got through it then. We’re going to be okay.” Optimism wins out again.

Billy raises her head. She’s sitting on her knees, hands rested on her thighs, arms rigid and straight. I sit down next to her.

Memories flood over me. I remember that night. I remember trying to run from it. We all did it in different ways — Caleb’s dissociation, Billy’s downward spiral. I knew we couldn’t run forever, but somehow I got beyond it. I thought things could be normal again. That’s what brought me to this road in the hot Nevada desert.

“We’re safe out here,” I say. “We’re hundreds of miles away from the nearest city. Let’s just drive on and find a place to sleep for the night.”

Billy nods. I help her up and we climb back into the car.

As late afternoon grows long, I keep the car steady and slow, afraid I might doze off. Billy stares out the window, motionless and quiet. We spot a motel just as the sun sets. Still following rule one.

The motel is five rooms stretching out in single-story wings on either side of a two-floor plantation-style house in the center. In the lobby, a cacophony of old clocks click in various meters like a bad jazz drummer. The walls are thin, brown panels disguised as real wood but unmistakably not. Owls, squirrels, and other taxidermied critters occupy every available surface, gathering dust in tortured expressions.

I’m too tired to make much sense of the environment, so I advance toward what appears to be the front desk. It’s unmanned. A bell on the counter instructs, “Ring for service,” and I obey. Ting. The sound reverberates off the stuffed animals as if to arouse them from death. My ears adjust after a moment and the sound of clocks ticking floods back in. “Hello?” I call out.

A few moments pass and no answer. I turn back to Billy. I can’t tell if she’s still internalizing the afternoon’s revelations or shocked from the surreal motel lobby. She avoids making eye contact with the animals, staring toward the ground. I grow anxious and turn back toward the front desk. The figure of an old man appears in the chair the way a bright spot appears on the back of your eyelids when you close your eyes after looking at the sun. My heart leaps.

“Sorry, I wasn’t sure anyone was here,” I say, laughing a bit to introduce some levity into the atmosphere.

The man remains silent. His back is crooked, as though he were bending over to pick something up. Thin, moist strings of white hair interrupt the landscape of his opaque, pink scalp. Thick folds of skin consume a bolo tie, which he has secured too tightly around his neck and inside the open collar of his brown, button-down shirt. He’s facing the floor, perhaps sleeping, and doesn’t appear to notice me. I apprehensively lean over the desk and try to catch his gaze.

“H-hello?” I stutter.

With a guttural spasm of the throat, the man booms something close to “yes,” or perhaps a cough. It’s not entirely clear, but I interpret it as the former.

“Hi, we’re hoping to rent a room.”

The man remains crooked forward, as if permanently. His right shoulder leans a full four inches below his left.

Maybe he’s hard of hearing, I tell myself, and start more loudly, “We’re hoping to re –”

“I heard you the first time,” he interrupts. “Yeah, we’ve got a room. Cash only.”

“That’s fine.” I say waiting for him to continue, but he remains motionless again, just like the stuffed owls and squirrels. “How much?”

“Fifty even,” he demands.

I count out a couple of twenties and a ten and thrust loose bills to the counter, then wait for the old man to acknowledge the payment or to do, well, anything. I’m disappointed yet again.

I turn toward Billy. She’s standing closer now, but still distant in every sense of the word. When I turn back to the front desk the old man is dangling a key from his left index finger a few inches from my face, startling me again in what is beginning to feel like a tedious prank.

I pull the key from his finger slowly, with the care and caution of a person attempting to deliver criticism without offending.

“Thank you,” I say, waiting for a response that never comes. The old man keeps his steady finger stretched toward me.

I look at the key and see that it has the room number on it – 103. “So we’ll just show ourselves to the room, if that’s okay.” This time, I interpret his silence as approval. I put a hand on Billy’s shoulder and guide her back outside, into the crisp dusk air. “Well, if today couldn’t get any weirder,” I joke, convinced it would be good for her for some reason.

We reach the car and collect a few things from the backseat for the night — a change of clothes, a bag of chips. I shove these into a backpack with my butt hanging out the rear driver’s side door while Billy sorts feebly through some things from the opposite side. We both finish at the same time and pull ourselves back out of the car.

I turn to the motel to look for 103. The rooms are numbered odd on the left wing, even on the right, from 101-109 and 102-110 respectively. I face Billy, the car between us, and gesture toward the room. “This way.”

We approach the door, unlock it, and step in.

5

Lesser Known Spots for the Adventurous Roadtripper
Jonathan Jones
Published August 2002]

…
In addition to Roadside’s mysterious history, fans of the motel and repeat visitors rave about its intriguing architecture. A two-story colonial-style house still stands. Reportedly, the original owner modeled this central part of the establishment based on a bed and breakfast he had visited on the East Coast. In a statement to his eccentricity, the owner is rumored to have spent most of his budget in the design and construction of the house, despite having no intention of keeping guests in it. As a result, the ten rooms that stretched out from the house were built hastily and on-the-cheap. The foundations of these rooms remain, but the rooms themselves burned in a suspected act of arson that occurred in October 1994, ten years after the motel closed its doors to guests.

6

Billy heads straight for the bed and collapses onto it, face-up and thin arms thrown loosely to either side.

I check the refrigerator — an open jug of Black Velvet whisky and a one-liter bottle of water with no label, both at room temperature. I suppress a sigh, grab the water, and pour into two glasses sitting atop the wet bar.

“You should hydrate,” I say to Billy, offering her one of the glasses. She sits up and, after a moment, grabs the water and pulls it straight to her mouth. The water vanishes and she wipes her mouth in an exaggerated way, like a kid.

Neither of us speaks, but we share a million thoughts between us. We see that night in Montana, the dark twists our lives took because of it, and the haunting contours of this trip and how it led us to this moment.

All these thoughts possess us. We don’t move. Billy drops her shoulders and sinks deeper into the bed, staring at the floor as it tows her downward. I stand next to her, a tree with loose, shallow roots and limbs hanging dead and dry.

Billy raises the bottle to her lips again and takes another exaggerated gulp. I notice the water has become a medicinal brown and my heart drops. I pry the bottle from her hands. Black Velvet. One year dry, now wasted. And only a few drops left.

I reach out to Billy and grab her shoulders, dig the pads of my fingers into hot skin and tight sinew beneath it. Her expression is unchanging as I bring her closer. The scent of Black Velvet burns my nose.

I search for the right words. Am I angry or sad?  Maybe this is what I wanted when I suggested we take this trip. Maybe I thought I could make myself feel better about what happened if I could make Billy come out worse from it.

A knock at the door derails my trail of though. I turn to the door, then back to Billy. Waves of heat spill out from her with each shallow exhale and strike me in the face. Other than this feeble sign of life, she is empty and still. I loose her shoulders from my grip and walk to the door.

Through the peephole, no face is waiting to meet mine. I breathe and notice I’ve been breathless, but for how long? I turn back to Billy. I move the muscles in my face to make what I hope is a reassuring expression. Billy doesn’t appear to register the gesture, so I’m saved from the pressure of making this effort a success.

Starting back toward Billy, my feet are halted by another knock at the door. One single knock that echoes off the walls, then off me, then back to the walls, and so on, each time with diminishing strength.

I look through the peephole again. The crooked man from the lobby is standing on the other side. The deep slant of his right shoulder appears deeper in the peephole’s fish-eye view.

I open the door apprehensively, but say nothing to the crooked man. He’s silent, too. I scan the horizon over his raised left shoulder, then over the other, expecting to see some sign that my sins have finally caught up with me. Maybe police lights. I catch myself pleading for finality. For years after that night, I went to sleep wondering if it was my last night as a free man. For years, I knew that I deserved whatever punishment was coming to me. It was torture. And now the feeling has returned.

Neither the crooked man nor I makes any attempt to break the silence, and so I close the door and turn back toward Billy.

The effect of the liquor is instant. I see Billy’s eyes drained of life. The warmth that had returned to her almost as soon as she went dry had left just as quickly, leaving her face sunken and pale. I struggle to escape a flashback to that dreadful morning I found her in a cold bath after God knows how many hours. I see an empty bottle of pills floating on the surface of the water, and it superimposes itself in my current reality over the empty bottle of Black Velvet on the floor. The same rage and paralysis seizes me.

A merciful second knock breaks me from my haunting illusion. I turn back toward the door, wrap my sweating fingers around the cold doorknob, and turn. The door releases with a firm click and I pull it inward to allow the cool air in once again.

My eyes lock onto Billy’s, who stands now where the crooked man stood moments ago. My mind rejects the illusion at first, and I turn my view toward the bed where Billy sits unmoved.

I feel myself floating. No, not floating. My feet no longer seem to be bearing my weight, but I look down to seem them still planted in the firm carpet below.

I return my gaze to the figure on the other side of the door. To Billy. She stares back into my eyes. I feel her drawing closer, her face growing bigger as it approaches. I feel a tremor shoot through my stomach, shock waves traveling first through my chest and pelvis, then through my neck and legs and arms. As the waves reach my fingertips and toes and dissipate into the vast ocean of heavy air folding over me, a new wave starts. After some fighting, I release my stare from Billy’s face to look downward.

Just above my waist and directly to the right of my navel, I see Billy’s hand thrust into my abdomen. My body slowly consumes her. Fingers, knuckles, wrist. No blood escapes. No wound opens. I notice an excruciating heat emanating from her. As she advances, blood vessels wriggle under my skin and try to escape the invasion. The heat grows, hotter. I take one step after another backward as Billy drives forward, I the marionette and she the puppet master. The walls bubble and boil and draw closer around the bed, where I feel myself descending slowly. The heat becomes tightness, then numbness, then nothing. Nothing can be held in my hands for long.

Epilogue

Local woman is latest Maine opioid victim
Portland Free Journal
February 14, 2017

Elizabeth Houlihan, 35, passed away Sunday due to a drug overdose. Her death is the culmination of a years-long battle with opioid addiction.

Elizabeth’s parents describe her passing as a tragic but predictable end to her story. They shared her story with the Journal to raise awareness about the national opioid crisis.

Shortly after turning 31, Elizabeth began taking prescription pills to manage insomnia. As her condition worsened, she was prescribed progressively stronger medications before ultimately arriving at oxycodone. She went through rehabilitation programs but always fell back into dependency.

To friends, who knew her as Billy, she was a bright and generous person before her addiction. “Billy was who I always went to when I was in trouble,” said one friend who corresponded with the Journal on the condition of anonymity. “I never would have imagined her being the type to fall into addiction.”

Her death comes amid continued attention on the opioid crisis from lawmakers in Augusta and Washington. According to figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, there were more than 63,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2016 alone. Mortality rates continue on an upward trend, meaning more communities are suffering tragedies like Billy’s.