Читать книгу Some Choose Darkness - Charlie Donlea - Страница 26

CHICAGO

AUGUST 1979

THE VOMITING CONTINUED FOR THE ENTIRE WEEK AFTER HER ENCOUNTER with the stranger in the alley. Her head swam with vertigo and her stomach roiled with nausea every time Angela thought of that morning. The dirty couch had sat abandoned for the entire day. The garbage men hadn’t touched it. The couch sat at an odd angle at the precipice of the open garage door, and Angela imagined they assumed it was there temporarily while the garage was being cleaned. She had watched through the slit in the curtain that covered the kitchen window as the garbage truck stopped in the alley and the guys emptied her overflowing trashcans into the back of the truck before hopping back onto the fender as the driver continued down the alley. Angela couldn’t bring herself to open the kitchen door and run to the alley to ask them to haul the couch away.

It was early afternoon when Angela had heard the honking that day. Her neighbor was attempting to pull his car into the garage directly across from Angela’s, but couldn’t make it past the couch to cut the tight angle. As was typical in Chicago, the constant honking of one’s horn was the chosen solution to nearly every problem a driver faced, from slow-moving traffic, to kids playing ball in the street, to a deserted couch in an alley. When the honking reached five nerve-racking minutes, Angela had finally gotten up the nerve to leave the house. She pulled the couch back into the garage, shut the door, and hurried back inside to bolt the door behind her. Once. Twice. Three times, to be sure.

She told Thomas about the day’s adventure as soon as he’d gotten home. He suggested they call the police, but when they discussed it further, Angela was at a loss for exactly what she would be reporting. That a stranger, and likely a neighbor, had been kind enough to offer his assistance? That a cat had frightened her the night before and filled her with the sense that she was being watched? Angela knew how that conversation would go. She could already see the sideways glances the officers would give each other while Angela stuttered through her explanation, all the time doing her best to avoid eye contact. The nervous plucking of her eyebrows would be looked upon like a contagious disease until the officers excused themselves to speak with Thomas in private about his paranoid wife, who was clearly making more out of things than was there. The further she discussed the incident with Thomas, the more absurd it sounded to call the police.

More pressing now, a week later, was Angela’s fear that she was on the verge of an obsessive-compulsive breakdown. That she even recognized its imminent approach, like thunderclouds on the horizon, could be considered progress. Years before, the affliction would descend upon her without warning to steal a week or a month as the demands of her mind sent her on meaningless tasks of redundancy. But in the new paradigm of her life, Angela not only sensed the collapse approaching, she fought like hell to prevent it. While she battled her condition, she also worked hard to hide the worst of her symptoms from Thomas. The lack of eyelashes was camouflaged by a thick application of mascara to the few follicles that remained, and a shadowing pencil bolstered her thinning eyebrows. Despite the sweltering heat, Angela had taken to wearing jeans and long shirts in lieu of shorts and tank tops in order to hide the bloody scabs that marked her shoulders and thighs from her nervous scratching.

The masking of her symptoms, however, was a venomous crutch that made things worse. The better Angela was able to conceal her habits of self-mutilation, the more dramatic her dependency on them became. She tried to stop herself with subtle tricks that had worked in the past. She kept the tips of her fingers slick with Vaseline to make more difficult the grasping of her eyebrow follicles. And she clipped her nails down to the soft pads of her fingers to make them benign tools as she dug into her skin. She was managing thus far to keep the worst of her breakdown hidden.

The vomiting, however, was becoming a problem. Thomas noticed it the other morning. When he checked on her, Angela had told him it was the result of bad Chinese food. In reality, the nausea came every time she worked herself into a frenzy with thoughts of the stranger from the alley. Each morning after Thomas left for work, Angela spent hours pulling the curtains of the kitchen door to the side so she could stare out into the alley. A routine developed: pull curtain, check alley, secure lock, lift phone, listen for dial tone, repeat. The only thing that broke the cycle was the need to vomit. Her stomach turned whenever the image popped into her mind of the man standing in the alley and peering through the open garage door and into her kitchen, which sent her to the bathroom in violent flurries of retching.

It was during a rare moment of lucidity a week after her encounter in the alley, when Angela had discovered an expired bottle of Valium from her previous doctor. Swallowing a tablet every six hours, Angela found, took the edge off, allowed her to sleep at night, and brought her mind back from the encounter in the garage. It was a temporary fix until she could reason with herself and calm her mind. She had beaten the obsessiveness before. She could do it again.

Under the calming effects of the Valium, Angela convinced herself that it was possible, and even likely, that her encounter in the alley was nothing more than a Good Samaritan offering his help. And it was very unlikely that the horror of the missing women could stretch this far out to the fringe of the city limits, where she lived a quiet life. She took a deep breath and tried to steady her shaking fingers as she poured her morning coffee. She stopped her gaze before she could look for the hundredth time out the back window and into the alley. Instead, she forced her thoughts to focus on the missing women and the profiles she had created. It had been days since she thought of them.

She retrieved the press clippings from the chest in her bedroom and spread them across the kitchen table. For two hours, Angela studied the missing women and the notes she had made about each of them. Perhaps it was the clean slate of her mind coming off a lost week of paranoia, or the Valium freeing her thoughts to flow in ways they hadn’t in the weeks before, but as she read through the profiles, she saw something she had missed previously. Her mind ran through the catalogued information, like scrolling through microfilm at the library. Articles she had read over the past years suddenly came together in her mind and she saw a pattern that had always been there, waiting to be discovered, but to this point had gone unnoticed. Her mind raced and she jotted notes, but the bleached-out exertion from fighting her OCD for the last week had frayed her neurons and brought self-doubt. Surely, she was wrong.

Pushing her insecurities aside, Angela scribbled notes frantically as thoughts spilled from her mind, fearful that if she didn’t capture them on the page they’d be lost forever. She recalled with great clarity the newspaper articles she had read years earlier and scribbled names and dates from the images that sped through her mind. When she finished, she looked at the clock. It was approaching the noon hour. She had sat down at the kitchen table three hours ago, but it felt like only minutes.

Quickly dressing in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, Angela stuffed her notes into her purse. A wave of nausea came over her as she imagined leaving the house, but she had no choice. She had to get to the library to confirm her suspicions. She knew, too, she would have to take another precaution. She needed confirmation that her thoughts were lucid and coherent, and not the result of her paranoia. And that confirmation could come from only one person.

Angela picked up the phone and dialed her friend Catherine’s number.

“Hello?”

“Catherine,” Angela said in a soft voice.

“Angela?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Are you feeling better? Thomas told Bill that you’ve been ill since the night we had dinner together.”

Perhaps, Angela considered, she hadn’t been hiding her symptoms as well as she imagined.

“I’m fine, but I need to talk with you. Can we meet?”

“Sure. Is something wrong?”

“No. I just need some help. Can I stop by in a while?”

“Of course,” Catherine said.

Angela hung up without saying good-bye, ran to the bathroom, and then vomited.