FICTION BY MATT FOX

Matt Fox lives in Rochester, New York, where he teaches English at Monroe Community College. He published a handful of poems when he was much younger and had a ponytail, and he has written some essays and plays, but he primarily writes fiction now. Occasionally he tries to write something besides horror, but it inevitably turns out dark and creepy.

RECOMPENSE
by Matt Fox

It happened one evening in November when I was leaving Margaret’s house.

The night was as raw as an ulcer. The skeletons of street trees rattled in the wind, still clutching their last leaves, and rain raked across the puddled pavement. I pulled my hood up, hurried down the driveway…

And stopped dead.

A woman sat on the curb next to my car, her knees pulled up against her chest, her face hidden in her bare arms. Her long hair was plastered wetly on her shoulder, and she shuddered in the rain as if she was sobbing. Her head was cocked sharply to the side.

Had she fallen or been hit by a car? Alarm rippled through me like a pulse of electricity. Margaret is a doctor, so my first thought was to go back inside the house to get her.

The woman sitting on the ground lifted her head and gazed at me through the yellow streetlight. Her face was as pale as porcelain. Her mascara was smeared like she had been punched in the eyes.

Andrea!

My whole body went cold.

I was definitely not getting Margaret.

I glanced back at the house, a bout of dread rising into my throat. The downstairs lights were already out, and Margaret’s bedroom window was dark. I prayed she didn’t look out, prayed that Andrea would stay calm. If there was to be any screaming and weeping, it could not happen here.

The distant shush of a car splashing through a puddle sounded so normal. The familiar sound was reality. And the reality was that right here, right now, I had a situation.

“What are you doing here?” I blurted.

Andrea winced like I’d just struck her. I realized too late I’d already provoked her, groped through the cacophony of panic in my mind for some way to contain the outburst that was about to happen. But she only lowered her head back onto her arms.

“I didn’t want to come here,” she said. Her voice was a brittle crepitus, thin as dead leaves.

I stood there a long moment trying to collect myself as the rain rattled against my hood. Her answer didn’t make any sense, and neither did her being here. Andrea knew nothing about Margaret except her first name. Yet here she was, sitting on the curb in front of Margaret’s house.

One thing was certain. I needed to get her out of here. Quickly.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

Andrea gazed at me through the rain, her eyes dark as obsidian. Something like a smile flickered across her lips as a siren rose in the windy distance.

“I’ll give you a ride home,” I said.

“That’s how it all started.”

This time I winced.

I had met Andrea at my weekly sobriety meeting. She wasn’t long out of inpatient and depended on our little group like a drowning sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam. One night she was standing outside without a ride home. I wasn’t about to leave her standing there.

But that act of kindness led to everything else. It led to the abandonment of all of my principals—and my moral ground shifted.

“Let me help you,” I said. After the words came out, I realized their irony. 

I took off my jacket, draped it around her shoulders as the cold pellets of rain pricked through my sweater. I reached behind her and pulled her to her feet. Her skin was cold and wet. As I helped her thread her arms into the sleeves, I saw her right forearm mottled with bruises like a clutch of black roses.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We happened,” she said, gazing at me through the smear of rained streetlight.

My body flooded with anger as I helped her into the passenger seat. Andrea couldn’t resist an opportunity to flog me for what happened.

I hadn’t intended to get involved with her. She initiated that by inviting me into her apartment. Things happened, and for a while, I wanted to be with her. But there had been so much pain, so much need. Even though I understood that newcomers into the world of sobriety were hurting, I never imagined that I could be the type of person who took advantage of it.

When the salvoes of texts and calls from the woman I helped finally diminished, I started to hope I’d escaped with my life intact. But even as the weeks passed quietly, I was haunted by a certainty that it wasn’t over, and that somehow I would pay a heavy recompense for what I had done.

I was most afraid that Margaret would find out.

I knew I should tell my long-time girlfriend, but the thought of confessing suffocated me with shame. I had worked hard for the meager respect Margaret gave me, and I could not bear to lose it. Besides, was it right to hurt Margaret just to ease my conscience? I decided to live with my guilt. That would be the recompense.

But Andrea was back in my car. The trap was closing on me again.

I glanced up at Margaret’s window again as I put the car in gear. From this angle, I could make out the rippled black of her curtains through the rain-streaked glass. Hopefully she was already in bed, oblivious to what was happening in front of her house. I’d been lucky so far and I hoped the luck would last.

I placed my foot on the gas pedal and smelled the vague whiff of Andrea’s lavender perfume that drifted my way as I turned up the heater. I pulled onto the street. A meager relief seeped into my chest as Margaret’s house receded into the rainy distance behind us. The immediate danger was over.

Now I had to make sure Andrea never came back here again.

Which meant that I not only had to make her understand that we were never going to be together again, but I had to convince her that it was not my choice or my fault, so she wouldn’t retaliate and tell Margaret. I needed to make her believe it wasn’t her or how I felt about her; it was our circumstances. If I could get her to accept that, I might be able to put this behind me. I might be able to escape and return to my life.

Most of all, I had to turn things around to make Andrea believe it was her fault. Perhaps if she blamed herself, she would leave me alone. I had a brief moment when I wondered if it was cruel to further damage a victim, but that thought passed quickly. It was about self preservation.

The way she slumped against the door, her head lolling against the window, made me hope that this conversation would be different. I had never seen this languor, this listlessness. This was not the Andrea who electrified our sobriety meeting, turned me into a smitten teenager, exhausted my empathy, and drove me to the edge of my own breakdown in the span of a month. Yes—her fault for tempting me.

“You don’t seem yourself,” I ventured. My headlights guttered across a row of apartment houses as I turned left, the arched windows flashing like startled eyes in the dark.

“I started drinking again,” Andrea said.

Because I ended the relationship? It was another cut at me. But I comforted myself by thinking that I didn’t pour the booze down her throat; she did. My hands knotted against the steering wheel as I wrestled back my anger. If I lashed back and provoked her, I would never convince her to put our affair behind her.

For a time, it was quiet save for the wipers slushing against the windshield and the tires splashing through puddles.

“I’m sorry about everything that happened,” I said. It was the right thing to say. Even I knew that.

Andrea turned her head slowly, gazed at me through the seep of dashboard light. “If I hadn’t been the way I was, would things be different?”

I wanted to believe I would have ended it anyway, but I knew better. God, those first days had been intoxicating, but it took less than a week for it to turn into a merciless, grinding inconvenience. Endless phone calls and texts, screaming, sobbing, self-flagellation. Andrea had been traumatized deeply and repeatedly, and she carried more pain than anyone I’d ever known.

It terrified me. But it also disgusted me.

“Look,” I said. “It has nothing to do with how you were. We all know that bad things happen to good people. But we also know that people who have some time in the program are not supposed to mix with newcomers. I ended it for your own good.”

“I wouldn’t have picked me either,” she said, seemingly not hearing what I said.

“I didn’t pick Margaret over you,” I said carefully. “It was our circumstances.”

The idea that our relationship was ethically wrong had triggered a new level of fury in Andrea when I brought it up weeks ago, but this time she only nodded limply. “Because you were an established member of the group, and I was vulnerable,” she said.

Almost the exact words I had used.

“Yes,” I said. I tried to console her by saying, “I knew better.”

I slowed toward the onramp to the expressway. A man with a hollow, whiskered face stood at the edge of the sidewalk with a limp cardboard sign, the words blurred to a soggy Rorschach image. He turned his back to the gusting rain, gazed at me accusingly as I passed.

“I was beyond fixing,” Andrea said.

“Nobody is beyond fixing,” I said. “You’re struggling with an addiction, and you’re in early sobriety. I know it feels hopeless, but your life will get better.”

How many times had I made that little speech? The long timers always nodded in agreement, and the new people smiled at me hopefully. But now it felt as thin as the mist edging from the corners of the windshield.

“My life.”

She held the word life on her lips as if she was studying it.

“I wanted to be with you,” I said. “I didn’t want it to end.”

Which was true for those first few days. God, even now she was lovely. Her face was as beautiful as etched marble in the hollow light of the dashboard. The raincoat had fallen open, and I caught myself looking at the curves of her breasts, sculpted perfectly beneath her wet shirt. My body stirred, and I thought for a moment that maybe she would invite me in again, that maybe it would happen one last time. A farewell.

I tore my gaze away from her and stared back at the dark canyon of the expressway. A car sat in the break-down lane ahead, its hazard lights flashing numbly in the rain. The driver leaned against the steering wheel like a sunken shadow. I ignored the driver’s problems and drove past.

“You made me feel safe,” Andrea said.

The words hit me like a blow to the chest. She told me that when she first invited me into her apartment, and it drew me to her like another addiction. Margaret asked nothing of me, needed nothing. I felt like an accessory to Margaret’s life rather than a part of it. Andrea’s need had felt as exhilarating as her body and breath, the tangy scent of her sweat and lavender perfume.

For a while there was only the slow metronome of the windshield wipers, the blurry headlights of oncoming cars curving toward us, the dark mass of concrete sound barrier sweeping by on our right. A heavy spatter of rain slapped into the windshield as we swept past an animal lying on the roadside. A dead deer, stiff as a pinata, its tufted fur thick with wet. One less deer to run in front of a car.

The sky rippled with lightning as I exited the expressway.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen lightning this late in the fall,” I said, mostly because I was tired of the conversation and wanted to change it.

Andrea just gazed out at the dark sky.  

“I know we can’t be together again,” she said.

This caught me by surprise. “Why are you here then?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer I could get.

“I don’t know.”

“How did you even find me?”

“That was Margaret’s house,” she said.

A chill thrummed through my bones, despite the heat churning from the floor.

“She doesn’t know about us,” Andrea continued. It was a statement, not a question. But it felt like a threat. I throttled the steering wheel as panic rose into my throat.

“I understand why you’re mad at me,” I said carefully, “but telling Margaret isn’t going to change anything. It’s only going to hurt her, and she doesn’t deserve that.”

“I’m not going to tell her.”

I slowed toward the exit, unsure whether I could trust the relief seeping through my chest. Then I saw the tear tracing down her cheek, her upper lip trembling. No, this was not a ploy. She really accepted the outcome, and Margaret would never know.

I could escape and return to my life!

We passed beneath a stoplight swaying in the wind, followed the empty street toward another intersection. I was dizzy with relief, and unspeakably grateful.

“I’m glad you found me tonight,” I said. “I’m glad we can end things differently than we did before.”

Andrea held me in her gaze a long moment. Then she nodded slowly, looked away.

I stopped at a red light, but there were no other cars in sight, just the dark hulks of buildings and puddles on the asphalt shimmering red beneath the light. I turned left onto Andrea’s block.

“Something happened,” she said.

So there was something else.

“What do you mean?” I asked. My body flooded with panic, and I wrenched the steering wheel so hard as I turned into her driveway that the tires shrieked.

“What do you mean?” I repeated when I stopped the car. I spun in my seat to face her.

But the passenger seat was empty.

“Andrea?”

My voice dissolved in the sudden emptiness of the car.

She had been sitting next to me only a second ago, wearing my jacket. I was still moving, so she couldn’t have gotten out without the safety alarms lighting up my dashboard like a slot machine. Yet the set was empty.

And I wore my jacket.

A familiar scent pulled at me. I brought the collar of the jacket up to my nose. It smelled like lavender perfume.

I felt cold and sick at the same time.

I shifted in my seat and gazed at the house as rain drummed on the car roof. Andrea’s front door hung open, swaying slowly in the wind. All I could see inside was a hollow of dark.

A voice from deep in the basement of my mind screamed at me to drive away, to put as much distance between me and this bizarre happening as I could. But I could not leave this unresolved. I needed to know what had happened; needed to make sure that it would not lead to Margaret discovering our affair. 

I got out of the car, walked through the spindrift of rain onto Andrea’s porch, a fathomless dread welling up from the roots of my spine. I peered through the open door, but it was like gazing into a dark cave, and all I could see were the darker outlines of its perimeter and the black maw of the kitchen archway.

“Andrea?”

I stepped inside, groped across the wall for a switch. I cringed as the room exploded suddenly into light.

Andrea’s coffee table was overturned onto its side, her unlit, scented candles and books strewn across the floor like they’d been washed there by a wave. A broken wineglass lay on the hardwood floor like a crushed seashell.

“Andrea?”

I walked across the room, the dread of what I might encounter drumming through my bones. The light spilled into the kitchen where a chair lay overturned on the creased linoleum. The refrigerator stood above it, angled toward the door as if someone had tried to move it but abandoned the effort.

And beneath the chair, a woman’s pale arm, her palm turned upwards, her forearm gouged with bruises.

“Andrea!”

I fell to my knees next to her, the floor reeling beneath me, my stomach surging into my throat. She lay on her back, her long hair fanned on the floor, her head twisted sharply onto her shoulder. I pushed the chair off her arm, clutched her shoulders and shook her gently. “Andrea? Wake up!”

It was as if someone else was speaking those words, for even as those seven syllables blossomed and faded, I knew Andrea was not okay. When I turned her face toward mine and gazed into the empty windows of her eyes, I knew that she was dead.

Someone had seized her by the arm, thrown her against the refrigerator so hard that the refrigerator moved. So hard that it broke her neck.

“Who did this to you?”

Her vacant eyes stared through me.

A clatter of footsteps on the porch. I climbed to my feet, stood there dizzy with fear and uncertainty. For a confused instant I hoped it was Andrea, that she would step into the living room alive and well and no longer lie dead at my feet. But a stocky man in a black Kevlar vest stepped into the doorway, swept his gaze across the overturned living room and glared at me, his eyes cold as iron.

“City police.” His voice rumbled like an oncoming subway train. “We’re responding to a call about a disturbance.”

“Andrea,” I managed to say. My throat was so tight with dread and disorientation that I could barely speak. “She’s hurt.” I couldn’t make myself say that she was dead.

The police officer squinted at me through the lighted front room, and his right hand settled onto his holster. “Please put your hands in the air and step forward,” he said.

I held my hands up and stepped into the front room. The policeman took a step toward me, then stepped aside so a second officer, a tall woman with black hair and almond eyes, could enter behind him.

“It’s the same plate number the caller gave,” the female officer said.

“And he matches the description,” the man said. Then he nodded at me. “I need you to keep your hands in the air and turn around.”

“I just got here,” I said as I turned. “I found her like this.”

I expected him to question me, but instead he levered my arms behind my back and pushed me to the floor. I was too surprised to resist, cried out in pain as my knees drove against the thin carpet. Then I felt the cold ligature of handcuffs on my wrists, heard them clack shut.

“I didn’t hurt her,” I said. “I drove her home, but she wasn’t in the car anymore. Her door was open. I found her in the kitchen.”

My mind was a blizzard of panic and bewilderment, but my words hung there long enough for me to hear them, understand that they made no sense. Nothing that happened since I left Margaret’s house made any sense.

And that terrified me more than anything.

The creak of the woman’s boots on the kitchen linoleum as the male officer held me by the back of my collar. “This is Unit 32,” she said. “We need an ambulance at our location. We have a female with a neck injury who’s not breathing. Over.” A gush of static, and another female voice replied, her words too garbled to discern.

“I found her like that,” I said. “I didn’t hurt her!”

“The neighbor called 911 twenty minutes ago and gave us your plate number,” the male officer said. “She also gave us your description, because you were on the porch pounding on the door.”

“No,” I stammered. “I just got here.”

I felt like I was toppling over the edge of a cliff.

“Save it for your lawyer,” he said. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” He kept reciting as he walked me to the squad car, but I was plummeting into an unspeakable reality, and his voice faded into the distance.

I was being arrested for killing Andrea.

Margaret would know.

Recompense had come due.