Page 18 of Slow Burn

She hated being helpless, hated it worse than anything else in the world.

Chapter Seven

Velvet

Velvet spat a ropy string of vomit that had the taste of Scotch and bitter sleeping pills into the toilet, and remembered Paolo. She felt hot enough to burst into flames, but tired, so tired.Great ending to the Velvet Daniels movie of the week, she thought.Hooker chokes on her own vomit.

“Could be worse,” she said aloud; her voice sounded raw and thick, and she could almost taste it in her mouth, medicine bitter. “Least I made it through the night.”

She decided, after thinking about it for a few minutes, that she wasn’t quite sick enough to throw up again, and turned on the shower. Cool water. After she’d been in the stream for about five minutes, she began to shiver, and sat down hard enough in the tub to make her tailbone twinge. She wrapped her arms around her knees and sat huddled in the rain.

Can’t stay out here all night, honey, her mother said, a distant whisper. A warm hand on her shoulder, on her cheek.Come inside. Come get warm.

“I’m hot.”

You’re going to catch your death, honey.

“Go away.” Velvet covered her face with wet cold hands and rocked back and forth, back and forth. Her heart sounded slow in her chest, like a clock running down. How many sleeping pills had she taken? Enough? Too many?

Honey—

Velvet reached out and batted the water off. It was too hard to get up again and dry off. She pulled a towel down from the rack and wrapped it tight around herself, rested her head on the hard cold lip of the tub, and closed her eyes.

Burt Everard Marshall was standing in her bath-room, fire dripping off of his hands like water, face melting like warm candle wax. His eyes were her mother’s soft kind eyes.

Dying is easy, he whispered, or she thought he did. She came upright with a gasp and clawed her way out of the tub, knelt next to the toilet again, and found more booze and pills to heave. The bathroom rug was a better place to lie, soft and warm. She closed her eyes again and this time Burt was right there, lying right next to her, warm as a campfire.

Jesus, she couldn’t even die comfortable. She got to her hands and knees and crawled, determined to find someplace not haunted. Her bed was all the way across the room, miles away, and the carpet kept rippling and moving, and now the bed was uphill. She hugged the rug.

“I’m not going to die,” she told Burt, when he appeared in the bathroom doorway to watch her. “See? I’m okay.”

Hard to tell if he nodded or not. When she closed her eyes again, she only saw darkness.

The phone woke her out of a warm sweaty silence, and she squinted against the glare of noon. She was lying in a thick square of sunlight, still twisted in the damp towel. Her stomach twinged again, but only as a reminder, and since the room had leveled out during the night, she stood up and walked to the bed, picked up the phone before flopping spread-eagled on the wrinkled sheets.

“Speak,” she said. God, her mouth tasted terrible. She couldn’t remember why.

“Honey, it’s your mom. Are you all right?”

Velvet pulled the towel closer and sat up against the cold wrought-iron headboard. Her hair felt slimy and thick on her shoulders; she patted it back with nervous fingers. It was brown when wet, almost the mousy shade she’d been born with.

“Yeah, Mom, I’m fine. How are you?”

“I’m fine. I’m not bothering you, am I?”

“No, of course not.”I was just sleeping off an overdose on the floor, Mom, nothing to be concerned about. Happens all the time.“So what’s happening down on the farm?”

“Your sister’s having another baby in October, isn’t that nice? And Ron Junior, he’s thinking about buying old Ned Armstrong’s hardware store and turning it into one of those chain stores. Oh, I don’t mean they’d sell chains, I mean—well, you know what I mean. And your Aunt Jane Lee had the flu, but she’s better now. Happy birthday, honey.”

“It’s not my birthday, Mom.”

“Oh, sure it is, honey. Your twenty-seventh birthday. Remember?”

Velvet pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her forehead on them, trying to press out the ache, but it kept tunneling deeper. It was somewhere around her stomach again.

“No, Mom, you’re talking about Amy.” Her voice was patient and not quite steady. Why didn’t she remember this would happen? It was the same every year, just the same, and she was always surprised. Maybe that was her part of the agreement, her half of the masochism. “Amy’s dead, Mom.”

The silence lasted for several seconds before the crying began, gentle empty sobs. In the middle of one of them the phone went dead, and Velvet listened to the flutter of the line and tried to find the strength to hang up.

---