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Auld Lang Syne

Amanda Doak

Get up. Nobody’s coming to save you.

I lay on the couch thinking of ways to kill myself and reasons not to. Gun to the temple? No, gun to the chin. Razor to the wrist? That was the token ladylike way to go, but it took too much precision, not fast enough. If I thought I could stomach it, I’d swallow drain cleaner, but I hate throwing up.

I sat up and glanced through the front window into the neighbor’s house across the street. It was late afternoon and getting dark. The lights on their Christmas tree leaked together in my vision, pools of liquid fireflies in rainbow colors. My throat burned with dry heat. I couldn’t remember the last time I drank anything. Or ate, for that matter.

I twisted my hair into a knot on top of my head, checked to make sure the Smith and Wesson .38 was still on the coffee table and realized it was New Year’s Eve. The thought of putting a tree up never crossed my mind. I’d been in the two-bedroom halfway house for almost a year. Like everything else in my life, it was bland, nondescript and it wasn’t mine. It would never be mine. All it did was mock me, around every corner, behind every door, teasing … it’s almost a home; you’re almost a normal forty-year-old. Almost.

I used to be addicted to painkillers. I didn’t recover. They quit doing their job, so I fired them. If there is a God to thank, I’d get to my knees and praise him for leaving me stranded; for not giving me the burden of dragging a husband or kid through the wreckage I left in my wake. All I had was a handful of failed relationships–failed because a man couldn’t kill the pain the way a pill could. That, and I think I scared them.

I was bloody knuckles and broken glass since the day I was born. I was left—left for Las Vegas and a shellacked blowhard (my mom … and her boss), left for a sticky bar with a few good men named Jack and Jim (my dad) and left for the aftermath of a diabetic coma from too many Honey Buns (my Granny Max). After that, I decided if I couldn’t make people love me, at least I could make them afraid of me.

Mom: I’ll come back and get you when we have more room, Wen. Bullshit.

Dad: I’ll be back in a few hours, slurring even as he left. Bullshit again.

Granny Max: I’ll be fine, Wen, a little sugar won’t kill me.  Bullshit, it did.

I sat up.

I turned the television on. Two talking heads were seated in a loge above a crowd in New York City. The man wore a blue suit, the woman wore red sparkles. Her plastic hair moved in a clump when the wind blew.

“Stay with Theresa and me for more from Times Square.”

“That’s right, Matt, we’re happy to celebrate with you as you prepare to welcome a new year, full of things that have never been …”

“I beg to differ, Theresa.” I snapped the TV off. Don’t try to fool me. We all live the same year on repeat and call it a life. I stood up and stretched.

I slid on a pair of slippers that could double as shoes and did double as shoes for the depressed and lazy. I slid my coat over my hoodie and threw my purse over my shoulder. Tradition called. I didn’t bother to lock the door behind me.

Like my halfway rent-a-house, my twice-used car was gold and nondescript. The vice store two blocks away from me was busy. Of course, it was. Liquor, lotto, cigarettes, junk food. After tonight, all the nitwits buzzing around in there would make a resolution to give up one or all those things. It wouldn’t stick. “Fare thee well, tobacco!” and predictably, in two days or less, grandma will light up at Tuesday night Euchre over the junk mail on her kitchen table with the same sentiment, only reversed, “Fare thee well, resolutions!” Shallow optimism and mediocrity. Two of my many, many pet peeves.

I parked in front of the ice chest by the front door. An old woman sat in the car next to me, furiously scratching lottery tickets with her overgrown thumbnail.

I went in. The lights were blinding. The floor was sticky, and the place smelled like strawberry sugar, burnt coffee and rubber.

I needed one shot-size bottle of Yukon Jack. I hated the taste. The burn made me gag. But a toast of two fingers of the foul shit was the last memory I had with my dad. I was barely 20 that week between Christmas and New Year’s when he finally got the best of himself. The neighbor found him dead on his kitchen floor three weeks later when he leaked into the man’s ceiling. The coroner thought he choked on his own vomit, but he couldn’t be sure.

I squeezed past an old man in a denim coat at the drip coffee station. He smelled like cigar smoke. No doubt he was a recovering alcoholic. They trade beer for coffee. They don’t need alcohol or caffeine. What they’re really looking for is something to hold onto that they know they can always get more of; something they can take all the way down to nothing; the coolers and burners their never-ending source of satisfaction.

I turned down an aisle, crowded with kids in snow boots, wiping snot on their coat sleeves and decided there was sugar down there, but probably not whiskey.

The beer was along the back of the store. A tall woman with red nails, obscenely long, and curly black hair talked on her cell phone, loud enough for the old woman scratching for jackpots in the parking lot to hear.

I rolled my eyes under the lids and pushed by.

There, in a rack of wire baskets, were one-ounce bottles of assorted liquor, all brands and flavors mixed together like boxes of books at a yard sale. I found what I wanted in the third basket from the top and moved to get in line.

Somehow, every person in the store while I searched for my holy grail, managed to form a line in front of the only clerk working. The last of the snot-wiping kids fell in behind his mother and cut me off.

I thought about setting the bottle on the shelf next to me, in front of the tree shaped air-fresheners, but I wasn’t in a hurry. I just didn’t like people and I despised waiting. I stared out at the parking lot while the clerk cashed in seven one dollar winning tickets from the woman in the car.

The bell on the door jingled. I turned to look at the next sinner on his way to buy something in which only adults are allowed to indulge.

I knew him.

We locked eyes.

Fuck.

There would be no turn of the head, pretending I didn’t notice him, no way out of the small talk that made me cringe and grind whatever was in my pocket with my fingernails. It’s frigid. Yep, so cold. Winter in Ohio. Heh heh. Take care.

“Wednesday?” I was born on a Sunday, but as the rhyme goes, Wednesday’s child is full of woe. I think my mother was a lukewarm prophecy and my dad was too drunk to care.

“Mark, hi.”

Mark Bregant was four years older than me but ran with the same post high school crowd I pretended to like for a while. Until the pills. Everything normal, albeit forced and false, was until the pills.

I was confused. Mark went to prison in 2002 for second-degree murder. He ran his girlfriend over with his Jeep in the backwoods of Wellsville where we used to camp. The public defender told the jury it was because she had a seizure in the middle of the woods and Mark panicked. She was suffering. It was a mercy killing. They called bullshit and he went to prison for fifteen years to life. At least, that’s what I heard from the four-wheeling recalcitrant waywards we hung out with.

After Mark went to prison, I stopped socializing altogether. It wasn’t long until I befriended Percocet. Mark’s girlfriend, Hannah, was the closest thing I had to a best friend. Whether it was a seizure or his Goodyear All-Terrains, she was dead and so was the sliver of me that was vulnerable to loss. You can’t unbury the dead.  If you could, out of everyone I’d lost, I’d unbury her.

“I thought you were …”

He shook his head. The line moved. The lotto lady stepped out of the way to organize her seven ones, face-up into her wallet.

“I’m out.”

“For good?” It was the only thing I could think to ask.

He glanced around to make sure no one was listening. “Possibly. Parole.”

The man in front of me with the coffee and bag of mini donuts turned to look at Mark.

He stepped closer to me. He seemed taller than I remembered. His blond hair receded with some gray in it. Although he looked worn, drugs and alcohol hadn’t aged him the way they do people on the outside. In a way, I realized, we’d both been in prison, just different versions.

“Has it been that long?” I whisper-talked.

“Twenty years. I was up five years ago, but they denied me. I wasn’t in enough programs.”

I nodded, eager to be left alone. He didn’t scare me. His acquaintance with me invaded my bubble. My bubble was fragile and bitter.

I said nothing, but he didn’t move.

“How are you doing?”

“Fine.” Always the same lie.

“Why are you in here New Year’s Eve with that sip of whiskey?” He pointed with his hand in the pocket of his generic nylon coat. It looked prison-issue blue. I wondered if they gave it to him when he left.

“Oh, just a tradition. I don’t drink. Except this,” I held up the small bottle. “One night a year, for old time’s sake.”

“You married? Kids?”

“Nope and nope.” I stared at the old man’s gray hair in front of me.

“Wow. I thought you’d be some professor in Chicago or New York. Never thought I’d run into you here.”

“And yet …” I fake smiled and held up both hands. The line moved again. The old man in front of me was next after the circus of crusty kids moved along with their harried mother.

Mark moved with me. I didn’t like it.

“What are you here for?” It couldn’t be beer, not on parole. He probably didn’t have enough money for lottery tickets, and I assumed he kicked the nicotine habit while he was in the clink.

“Coffee.”

Of course.

The old man was sticking his wallet in the back pocket of his Levis. I moved up to the counter.

“Listen, I’m in the apartments off of Cedar, for now anyway,” as though that should give me hope for his future, “I’m alone. You’re alone …”

I put the plastic shot bottle on the counter and swiped my debit card. The clerk, Todd, had deep cuts on his dry fingers and chewed a piece of gum to death. His eyes danced between Mark and me as we spoke, breath bated with suspense to see if I’d turn him down.

“No one should be alone on New Year’s Eve,” he finished.

I thanked Todd, slid the bottle in my pocket and walked toward the glass doors. “I’m always alone, Mark. I like being alone.”

“I have a curfew. It’s 11:00 p.m., but it’s better than nothing. Come on. For old time’s sake?” I hated when people reused my words against me, almost as much as I hated small talk. “I noticed you the second I walked in. It has to be fate.”

“The blessed are always under surveillance.”

“And you’re more beautiful than I remembered.”

“And there’s nothing worse than a grown man telling lies.” I opened the door, forced a middle-aged woman to stand aside and didn’t hold it for her.

Mark followed me out to my car.

“What about your coffee?”

“Forget the coffee,” he said.

“Are you okay?” I wasn’t sure if he meant permanently or at the moment.

“I’m breathing, aren’t I?”

“Hannah’s dead, Wen. Dead is dead, right?” He looked at me like he was trying to coax something out of me.

“Did they teach you that in prison school?”

He looked defeated. And a tiny bit angry.

I squinted at him, unable to believe he was able to stand in front of me and say those words.

“All these years, I had hope.”

“Hope,” I let out a dry snort. My breath fogged in the cold air. “Fuck hope. Hope is an awful thing.” I got in the used gold nondescript, slammed the door and left Mark standing in the parking lot holding his hands up.

I walked in the house and let the storm door slam behind me. I had a habit of leaving the man door open, even in the winter. I threw my purse on the floor next to the front door. Granny Max would’ve scolded me. A purse on the floor means fortune out the door. Or, so says Polish superstition.

A papery brown leaf fell off the sagging poinsettia on my windowsill. Some Christian group left it on my doorstep. I brought it in because it had the audacity to survive the snow for two days on my porch. It was my only dependent. I grew to like it, then I killed it.

I was going to wait until midnight to shoot the whiskey, but the hell with it. Why not? I could go get more. Get blackout drunk, see if I could figure out why my dad loved that state of being so much. Maybe it would be a relief.

Then I thought twice. I’d throw up until my head throbbed, then I’d throw up more. I’d end up crying, which I despised (probably more than I despised waiting) and possibly have to go to the hospital where I’d bake in an overheated waiting room full of the same caliber of people I just saw at the vice store.

I tossed the shot on the coffee table.

I went to the kitchen, popped a can of rip-off diet cola Granny Max got me hooked on and made my way back to the couch.

Heavy pounding on the glass of my storm door stopped me mid-sip.

A man stood there, but I couldn’t see his face. The glass was covered in fog-going-on-ice.

I set the can on the coffee table, knowing it was either the cops or Mark. Anyone else would’ve stormed through.

I opened the door a crack, then further. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

“I followed you. To the store too. I’ve been following you. You don’t go too many places.” I stared at him. His hands were in his generic nylon pockets. He motioned with them to my living room. “Can I come in? It’s freezing out here.”

In the time between seconds, I tried to decide whether letting him in was a bad idea. Most people would’ve slid the deadbolt and called 911, but most people didn’t live like they had nothing to lose. I held the door open.

He looked around, judging my builder-white walls and corduroy couch.

“Nice place. I think I had more art in my cell, but it’s not bad.”

“Why are you here?”

Mark shrugged. “For your banquet of consequences.” He strolled past me without asking, looking around. He glanced at the plant on my windowsill and went to the kitchen. I heard the faucet. 

“What consequences, Mark?” I looked at the gun on the coffee table and wondered if he noticed it. I put one bullet in it and spun the cylinder this morning. I regretted it. I should’ve filled the sucker. “I think you need to leave.”

Mark put the cup next to the gun on the table and sat down on the couch. He rested his elbows on his long legs.

I suddenly had the urge to protect myself. It was something I didn’t remember feeling before.

“I’m not going anywhere, Wen.” He patted the cushion next to him. “Come. Sit. It’s a night for old friends, a round for old time’s sake, right?”

I sat down next to him, only because it put me closer to the gun on the table. “I try not to think about old friends and old times.”

“Just a defense-mechanism.” He looked at me and sat back. He clasped his hands behind his head. “Being locked up … well, it does a lot of things to man. It gives him a stigma, like he’s not smart enough to follow the rules. But really, it makes him patient … and bitter. The more years go by, the time he has to let the fury fester.

“Then, they sit him in front of a panel of assholes and, if he shows remorse and begs in the right tone of voice, which is simple to do when that’s all he has time to do in his cell—practice the way he should sound and look—they stamp a paper. One paper.  And you know what happens then?”

I shook my head no. I inched to the edge of the cushion, ever closer to the gun.

“They create a monster, then they let him out. They set him free.”

I wasn’t nervous. My heart didn’t pound. It was a muscle and that muscle atrophied from years of nonuse long ago. My senses were suspended; hanging in mid-air, waiting to be told what to do.

“I think you know what it’s like to be a monster, don’t you, Wen?”

“I know what it’s like to need someone that’s not there.” I stared at him head-on. “That doesn’t make me a monster. That makes me someone who refuses to need anyone ever again.”

“You needed Hannah, though. That’s the one thing I never made sense of. Night after night, day after day, in that cage, I wondered why you made me kill her.”

I shook my head.

He leaned close to me. In a whisper, “Then it clicked.” He snapped his fingers.

I jumped.

“You wanted me.”

“You did it on purpose. My God. She never had a seizure. It wasn’t a mercy killing.” I couldn’t help but let out a half-smile. “You murdered her.”

Mark turned his face toward me, the smallest hint of a grin nipped at the corners of his mouth.

“You told me to, Wednesday. Don’t act surprised.”

“I didn’t tell you to kill Hannah. She was the only person in the world I liked.”

“But you did. Not with words, no. But I could tell you wanted me, and she was in the way. All those nights around the fire, your eyes lit up. They glowed. You were happy when you were with me.”

“I was with Hannah. I was with the only people who ever made me feel like life was more than the simple, stupid weight of accumulating days. You were there, Mark, but so were a lot of people.”

He stood up.

My face tilted up to watch him. I watch the hinges of his jaw clench.

“I waited all those years to get out. To find you and surprise you. And this is it? You were the only person I had left in the world for twenty years. And now, I’m … what? What am I to you, Wednesday?”

Softening my true feelings into buttery smooth let-downs wasn’t something in which I was fluent. I had to stop myself from saying, “a murderer” and, like a person driving a stick shift for the first time, maneuver my thoughts into something that wouldn’t ignite the psychotic parolee standing in front of me.

“An acquaintance.”

He rolled his neck like he was warming up for a wind sprint and stuck out his hand like he wanted me to shake it. I didn’t know what to do. He thrust it toward me harder.

Reluctantly, I put my hand in his.

He shook it as though we were meeting for the first time. He didn’t let go.

“My pleasure to make your acquaintance, Wednesday,” through gritted teeth.

He squeezed harder.

I stood, rising to meet the pain.

“Acquaintances are forgotten.” He squeezed until I felt the bones in my hand touching one another. He ground them together until I felt them breaking, one by one.

I yelled in pain.

I reached the gun with my left hand and held it up, shaking, at Mark’s face.

He let go of my right hand. It hung at the end of my arm like a bag of marbles.

Mark backed up.

I pulled the trigger.

Click.

Before I could try again, he lunged at me. He knocked me to the ground. I sent a knee into the bottom of his chin. His teeth clacked when top met bottom.

I wiggled free and ran for the bathroom. It was the only room with a lock on the door. 

I turned to pull the knob and punch the lock. He stumbled in big, hungry steps toward me.

I shut him out with barely a second to spare.

He beat on the door with two heavy fists. Then he kicked it. It rattled but didn’t give.

I didn’t have long until the cheap, hollow door with its cheap brass-button lock would splinter. I had one solution. I thought around it for less than ten seconds while Mark threw his weight at the only thing separating him from me.

I opened the cylinder, re-seated the bullet, with left-handed clumsiness, and closed it with my left thumb. I tucked the gun under my right armpit. I took a breath and opened the door.

It stunned Mark. He fell halfway through the door. When he saw me draw the revolver, he backed up.

I held it to my left temple. The last thing I heard was the shot. It sounded like a bell. Then, everything went black.

▪

BLUE AND RED LIGHTS swirling made the quiet cul-de-sac look criminal and officially bad. It was the kind of illumination that brought all the neighbors to their windows. Blinds parted. Lamp lights went dark so the lonely middle-aged women could see better while they talked on their cellphones.

“See, I got a problem with this, Mark.” Officer Louis Barnes cuffed Mark before he sat him down on the sagging leftover couch. “You’re on paper. For murder in the second, nonetheless,” he raised his thick black eyebrows and stuck the stub of a pencil behind his ear, “and you call us because your … what? What is she to you? Girlfriend?”

Mark shook his head.

“Well, she’s shot in the head. And you’re telling me it’s suicide?”

Mark nodded.

“Unfortunately,” Barnes sat his hefty body next to Mark, “her right hand is all mashed to shit, so I had to look around a little to figure out which hand was dominant.” He pulled out a piece of cinnamon gum and walked it into his mouth. He chewed for a second. “Handle of the coffee mug on the counter …to the right. Mouse next to the computer monitor … right hand side. Purse … on the floor to the right of her shoes.

“Now, what you’re telling me is you mashed her hand trying to defend yourself from her and that explains why she shot herself with her left hand.” Barnes looked off to the dead beige wall and rubbed his chin.

“I don’t buy it. ‘Course your record doesn’t help you none. I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Wednesday Maxwell.” As an afterthought, “By the way … what was she to you anyway?”

Mark looked into Barnes’s black eyes. “An old acquaintance.”

▪ ▪ ▪

Ms. Doak was recently published in CafeLit Magazine and The Volney Road Review. She was a semi-finalist in The Iron Horse Review Long Story Competition and featured on The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Podcast in their “Books with Hooks” segment. She writes dark fiction from Ravenna, Ohio, where she is a single mom to three kiddos.

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