Abomination Read online

  That was the beginning of a relationship Jamie truly believed would be consecrated by the words I Do and last until one of them shed their mortal coil. On the most basic of levels, she fulfilled his every primal, carnal need. They had sex four, five, sometimes six times a week. Her libido never faltered, never faded, never waned. Even when it was her time of the month and the idea of intercourse was a messy proposition and out of the question, she would still ask him to get her off, and in return she would give him an extra-long, extra-sensuous blowjob. The sex was awesome (both the quality and quantity), and that was of utmost importance to any guy in his early twenties, but it wasn’t the only thing which attracted him to Samantha. Her body was perfect and her skills exquisite (sometimes it made him queasy thinking about where she had honed those skills), but her mind wasn’t too shabby, either. She was smart and knowledgeable, well-read and world-traveled. She could hold her own in most conversations and arguments.

  Samantha Hendricks was the perfect amalgam of brains and beauty, and the two and a half years they spent together in Philadelphia were absolute magic.

  When he relocated back to northern Jersey to begin his residency in June after graduating, she promised him that nothing would change between them, that she would put all of her energy into her work and her studies and that would keep her from missing him too much when they were apart. He believed her, partly because he thought it was true, and partly because he desperately wanted it to be true. She was older and wiser than the sorority girl she had been when they had met, twenty-four compared to twenty one, and driven by more than just her libido. She had more mature desires at that point in her life. She talked about marriage and settling down and having children. He was the one she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.

  He should have known better.

  The old axiom said absence makes the heart grow fonder. In Samantha Hendricks’ case, it went absence makes the cunt go wander.

  Jamie sighed as he shifted on the uncomfortable motel bed.

  The relationship wasn’t over. Not officially, but it was heading downhill quickly. Samantha could deny her slippage all she wanted. But he knew. Zebras couldn’t shed their stripes and leopards couldn’t change their spots and people simply didn’t change their natures. The signs had been there since the month after they separated but he had rationalized them away, not wanting to see the truth unwind before him. He refused to see—or failed to see—the writing on the wall, failed to comprehend that he was slowly becoming Mister Architect-Still-in-Maryland.

  Mister Doctor-Now-In-Newark.

  During July and August and September he had visited Samantha every weekend, going to the mall or the bookstore or watching television in her apartment while she studied. It wasn’t like when they were both in school and saw each other every day, but it was enough for him.

  It proved not to be enough for her.

  Come October, he saw her only two weekends out of the four. She claimed that she was swamped with work and didn’t need the distraction. On one hand, he understood the distancing. All of the stress that accompanied senior year, the final year of the trial by fire, was suddenly bearing down on her. There were requirements to complete and tests to take and mock boards to study for. It was a grueling final six months, and maybe his presence would be too much of a distraction. But on the other hand… Samantha was a girl who released her stress, took a break from the rigors of studying, by fucking, and here she was telling him that she was fine without sex for two weeks. And during the two weekends he did spend with her, she acted distracted, distant; even during sex, when she normally displayed an almost feral passion, she seemed almost disinterested.

  That was his first clue that something was wrong, but he initially chalked up her lack of interest and energy to the strain and demands of school. His mind made excuses, but deep down he knew the truth. He just didn’t want to accept it. Or even look at it.

  The second clue came the first week in November, only four weeks ago, when he decided to surprise Samantha. It was now the third weekend she asked him not to come down to Philly because she was inundated. He went down that Saturday anyway, his overnight bag containing a bottle of wine, scented bubble bath and edible, warming massage lotions. He intended to do everything in his power to loosen her up and make her forget about school, if only for an evening.

  He approached the door to her apartment and was about to knock when he heard a man’s voice coming from inside. He stopped, his knuckles a mere inch from the door, then chided himself for being so paranoid. It was the television. It had to be. But then he heard the voice again, this time as a laugh, followed by Samantha’s own giggle, and he knew that there was another man inside. Could be a study partner. Could be a whole study group. But he didn’t think so.

  He knocked on the door and Samantha asked who it was. She sounded tipsy. It’s me, he remembered saying, blood beginning to pound in his ears. She opened the door slightly, trying to prevent him from seeing inside, but there was no chain latch, and he bulled his way past her into the apartment and into the main room where he found one of Samantha’s classmates, a douche named Peter Fauerbach, trying to escape into the bathroom before he was seen. He froze when he saw Jamie.

  Jamie remembered the tableau with an aching clarity. Peter and Samantha in their jammies, both tipsy, books and papers and notecards scattered about the floor like a tornado had ripped through the small apartment. Jamie remembered the fear on Peter’s face. He remembered Samantha begging him not to hurt Peter. We were just studying, she cried, her voice almost a sob. We didn’t do anything. He remembered using every ounce of willpower to lower his blood pressure and smother the anger which rapidly swelled within him. Because when he got angry, people got hurt.

  He remembered turning on Samantha and glowering at her, the wrath of hell evident on his face by the way she cringed, before storming out. He drove home at ninety miles per hour, his bag of relaxation goodies still at his side.

  They didn’t talk again until Wednesday. She apologized for what had happened when she eventually called, for lying to him, and begged him for another chance, promising that it wouldn’t happen again. And like a fool, he had given it to her. Because he loved her. Because he had three years’ worth of time and money and emotion wrapped up in this relationship, and if nothing had happened between her and Peter except for a little wine, if the worst was that she had deceived him a bit, well he could get past that.

  He had gone down to visit her two straight weekends after that, and he allowed things to normalize. She showed him how sorry she was in amazing and wonderful ways that left him gasping for air. For those two weeks, he thought everything would be all right. He willfully muted that voice in the back of his head that wondered at how many condoms Samantha and Peter had burned through during those stretches when she had asked him to stay away for the weekend.

  But then last night’s phone call had happened and he needed to accept that, despite Samantha’s protests otherwise, he was now Mister Architect-Still-in-Maryland.

  No, he was Mister Dentist-Now-in-Newark. Different name but same game. A cuckold in every way that mattered.

  As Jamie sat on the motel room bed, pen in one hand, notebook on his lap, ESPN playing on the TV, he knew he needed to make a decision. Did he allow her to play him, to string him along, in the hope that it would all work out in the end? In the hope that all Peter Fauerbach was was a distraction to get her through the lonely nights and not his replacement? Or did he take control of the relationship, make a preemptive strike, and pull the rug out from under her. He didn’t know. He just didn’t know. He loved her despite everything. Still wanted to marry her. But at the same time, he hated to be manipulated. And he hated not knowing whether or not he could trust her

  He wondered for a moment if Mister Architect-Still-in-Maryland had had these very same thoughts three years ago.

  Did he hold on to hope? Or was it time to start over? He would be the first to admit that that thought scared him more tha
n a little. Start over. At twenty-five, he felt old. Too old to be single. It was a ridiculous notion, of course, that he was too old and there was no time to begin again, but he allowed himself to feel miserable at the possibility for a moment anyway.

  Jamie looked over at the ten dollar alarm clock on the nightstand and the moment was over. It was five minutes to five. Time to meet his parents and go visit his grandfather. He tossed the notebook and pen onto the bed, stood and stretched. The television was still on. He reached toward the remote control, which rested on the bed, but stalled out midway, his hand grasping nothing but empty air. From the corner of his eye, he spied his notebook. The page where he should have been scribbling a tribute to Grandma Anna instead of thinking about Samantha should have been blank.

  It wasn’t.

  He didn’t remember writing anything during his daydreaming, but he obviously had, as a single word spelled out in big black letters, all caps, stared back at him, the thick dark print standing in heavy contrast against the white paper. A single word written by some miserable, subconscious part of his mind. A single awful, terrifying word that sent his spine tingling.

  ABOMINATION

  Chapter 7

  The distance from the motel to Jamie’s grandfather’s house was only ten miles, but the trip took thirty minutes because of the holiday traffic that congested every road. Jamie returned to his previous position of looking out the window as Steve drove, watching as the sun began its gentle fall behind the horizon and the purple haze of twilight began to darken the world outside the car.

  His mind was scattered. For most of last night and today, he had done nothing but think about his grandmother’s death, his mother’s emotional state and his possibly soon to be ex-girlfriend. They all affected his life in a very profound and immediate manner, and he couldn’t help but wonder how each situation would influence the direction of his life, both in the coming days and in the more distant future.

  Lost in the emotional turmoil of the past twenty-four hours were the old gypsy woman and her confusing, hateful words. While his conscious mind had buried the entire episode, rendering it effectively forgotten, some dark, primitive part of his consciousness wanted him to remember what she had said, expressing itself through pen and paper while he daydreamed. And for the first time since his trip home from work yesterday, he found himself thinking about her, about her words, trying to understand what they meant and why they still unnerved him. He spent the entire half an hour car ride replaying the conversation in his head, trying to make some rational sense of Elena Ionesco’s irrational accusations.

  You are a monstru.

  An abomination. An anathema to the purity of life

  Just because you do exist does not mean you should exist.

  They were nonsensical concepts that didn’t intersect with the rational world. Absurd allegations from a diseased brain that simply made no sense. As such, the words shouldn’t have bothered him. True, his history was stained by violence, but that was a lifetime ago, and now he was nothing more than an average twenty-six year old dealing with the usual life problems of a guy his age. But the words, the accusations, they nibbled at his brain anyway, at some dark, hidden part of his mind like an internal, impossible-to-reach itch.

  What made him truly upset, though, were not the words themselves, but the irrational fear that, somehow, despite the impossibility of it all, there was some truth behind what she had said.

  It was a fear he just couldn’t shake.

  When the family finally arrived at his grandfather’s home, Jamie still hadn’t stumbled upon some great epiphany which explained away the gypsy’s behavior in some rational way. But seeing his grandfather’s house made him once again forget the old woman and her accusations, at least temporarily.

  The house was a simple one-story affair, the stucco siding the dark beige color of sunbaked clay. A narrow driveway led to a single garage, and a stone path constructed of multi-colored paving stones curled from the driveway to the front door. Several short bushes set in mulch beneath the windows and a single tree erupting from the center of the lawn compromised the entirety of the home’s landscaping. The entire block, both sides of the street included, were populated by identical houses, the only differences between them being the color. There was a wide assortment of shades along the road, including white, pale yellow, sky blue, and gray. But all the homes shared the same dimensions and landscaping. It was suburbia at its finest, dull and drab and uninspiring. But Jamie imagined that the elderly people who lived on the street found comfort in the conformity.

  A dozen or so cars were already parked along the street by the house. Steve parked the rental car behind a rust-brown Buick that appeared to have been assembled during the year of the flood. The three of them clambered from the car and started towards the house in silence.

  Once inside, Jamie was amazed by the number of people present. There must have been at least forty people crammed inside the two bedroom sardine can his grandparents had called home for almost ten years. The number of cars outside seemed too few to bring this many people, but he assumed that a fair share of the mourners had walked from their homes. Grandma Anna had always been popular wherever she lived and she no doubt had purchased the loyalty and friendship of many of her neighbors with fresh pies and a kind laugh.

  In the living room, to the left of the front entrance, the catering staff had set up two long tables covered with black cloths. The tables brimmed with platters stacked high with warm deli meats, including turkey and roast beef and ham, assorted cheeses (sliced and cubed) and vegetables, including pickles quartered the long way into spears, sliced tomatoes, and lettuce. There were several bread baskets loaded with rye and white breads and several different kinds of rolls. Small plastic containers of ketchup and mustard and Russian dressing had been placed in strategic places along the tables. A small square poker table, similarly draped in black and bearing several dozen cans of soda, was set up in the far corner. Jamie inspected the food and found that he wasn’t hungry, the McDonalds still heavy in his stomach, resisting digestion. But he did take a can of soda, tearing off the top and pouring the contents into a cup with ice.

  The air in the small house was uncomfortably warm despite the November chill outside, and the smell… the odor was sharp to Jamie’s nostrils, unpleasant, medicinal, like being in a hospital or a nursing home. It may have been politically incorrect to imply that old people smelled funny, but it was true, and the scent of this many older people stuffed into a cramped, warm space assaulted his senses.

  Doing his best to breathe through his mouth, Jamie separated from his parents and slowly made his way through the house. From what he could tell he was the youngest person there. In fact, he didn’t think he saw anyone younger or even the same age as his mother or Steve. The guests were exclusively people in their seventies and eighties, a collection of women with blue or white hair and dressed in their Sunday finest, and bald and balding men dressed in slacks pulled up to their nipples, plaid shirts and suspenders. For a brief moment, Jamie imagined he was in a community center on Bingo Night. He half-expected someone to whip out a hopper and start drawing out balls. I 25. I 25, ladies and gentlemen. I 25. Next is O 67. Anyone have O 67?

  But it wasn’t a community center and it wasn’t Bingo Night. It was his grandparent’s house and the people there weren’t there to have fun. They were there to offer their sympathy and remember a dear departed friend.

  Most of the people were strangers to Jamie, friends from the neighborhood he had never met, bridge and Mahjong partners and drinking and smoking buddies. Between his grandfather’s family and grandmother’s family, there weren’t too many surviving relatives, just a handful, and it appeared that some of them had decided not to make the trip. He recognized only a few people: Aunt Barbara (who had driven up from Miami with her third husband, Peter), Gary and Margo Fallon from across the street, and Gail and Norm Goldman from next door. He stopped when he saw someone he knew, made small talk and accepted c
ondolences when offered. Pretended to recognize strangers who seemed to know him, faking it so as to not offend them.

  He slowly made his way from the foyer to the kitchen, making his way through the den and family room as he shuffled along. His progress was purposefully slow. Part of him didn’t want to see his grandfather, who he knew was sitting at the kitchen table with his mom and Steve. His grandmother was dead—a fact that was indisputable—but seeing his grandfather without Grandma Anna at his side, tears staining his wrinkled face, would solidify the reality. If he could avoid seeing his grandfather he could pretend that Anna was still alive. It was silly and childish, of course, because dead was dead was dead—this wasn’t a fucking comic book where the dead never stayed quite dead—but he wanted to hold onto the fantasy as long as possible.

  When he finally reached the small kitchen, it was empty save for his parents and grandfather. His mother and Steve sat uncomfortably on a pair of ancient wicker chairs. Between them, sagging uncomfortably in his own chair, sat his grandfather. A walker, complete with split tennis balls pushed over the front two feet, stood before him. Jamie hardly recognized the man. He last saw his grandparents three months ago when they came north to visit during the summer. His grandfather had looked old—he was eighty-eight after all—but it was a healthy, dignified old. Now he looked sickly and old. Dark, wrinkled skin had given way to a pale, pasty complexion. All of the meat was gone from his bones, the skin dangling from scrawny arms like melted wax. His clothing hung loosely on his body, rags on the straw frame of a scarecrow. His eyes, always so full of life and wisdom, had dimmed. The only feature that remained recognizable was his the top of his head, which was mostly bald except for a ring of gray hair that circled from ear to ear around the back of his scalp. When Hal Whitman finally looked up at his grandson, acknowledging his sudden arrival, his eyes seemed to focus on something behind him, over his shoulder, and Jamie wondered if he even saw him.