“And you, Nikki, what do you do?” Gail asked. They weren’t yet done with their appetizers and they had already burned through most of the usual small talk.
Harriet sat at the head of the table, a guest of honor position that left only one open seat at the opposite end of the long dinner table. It wasn’t a first-class affair; there were no silver dining trays, but the air of the room was stiff.
Awkward, as her kids at the center would say, misappropriating the word most of the times they chose to use it.
“I work with kids,” Nikki said. Gail’s eyes lit up and she cut in before Nikki could elaborate.
“A teacher! So wonderful. What grade? What subject?”
Gail sat in the middle of the table, flanked on either side by two residents, and next to them two Mercy House employees, the pattern of no resident being too far from professional help continuing around the table.
“Not kids, little monsters,” Harriet said. “She’s not a teacher.” Her mother-in-law didn’t have to speak up to be heard, there was no chatter around the table. Everyone was taking turns when they spoke, one at a time like they were onstage, a by-product of this forced interaction. Don, seated in a corner in between his mother and Nikki, shushed her.
“I work at a youth center as a counselor for the Department of Human Services. I see troubled teens and talk to them about making better choices.” It was the two-sentence pitch she had prepared for social situations. Anything beyond that and she’d likely end up using words like drugs or gun violence or prostitution, and that always seemed to take some of the officious sheen off the job description, true as it was.
Gail reached a hand across the large table, but since Nikki was too far away, her free hand in her lap, the woman had to settle for patting the oak between them instead of squeezing Nikki’s hand. “Well, bless you for your service anyway. A valuable institution,” she said.
Nikki said thanks and stuffed her mouth with Caesar salad, signaling that it was time for the conversation to bounce back to either Don or Harriet, that she’d answered the question posed and it was no longer her turn.
“A contractor and a social worker, such an odd pairing. How did you two meet?” Gail said. She must have sensed Nikki’s reluctance because the question was directed toward Don.
Nikki allowed herself to relax and listen to Don’s version of the story. She was usually the one telling it at parties, had allotted for all the appropriate pauses and had a few jokes to go along with it, but she’d let Don take it this time.
Long story short: Once upon a time there was construction in her building and Don had been the one to kick her out of her office. He was nice about it, though, and not in a way that told her he was being nice because she was young and attractive. He offered to buy her coffee for the inconvenience of disrupting her workspace, and then went to the staff lounge and the communal coffeepot to get it.
It had been cute, even though he was the shortest man she had ever dated, and one of only two white guys. And he was still cute, with the smile of a boy but the grit and scars and sadness of a man.
She looked at the faces around her. The staffers, five of them including Gail, were all looking politely engaged in Don’s story, boredom still seeping through the holes in some of their masks, with only the doctor looking openly hostile to conversation.
The doctor had introduced himself, but Nikki had already forgotten his name. He had a pencil mustache and looked ready to fall asleep. Across from him was a warm nurse with a Spanish name. Flores. That meant flower, right? Nikki had asked, and the woman had nodded Yes, before returning to helping the old woman and man on either side of her, rearranging one’s grip on her fork after she’d tried to pick up her salad with a steak knife.
Don reached the punch line of the story and most of the table, those who had heard him and been following along, laughed. The big man across from Flores laughed the loudest, but that was to be expected, he was a giant. His name had been something equally big-sounding, a strong syllable that required you to fill your cheeks with air and that sounded like a Samoan or Mauri war cry when he said it. Even though his ancestry probably wasn’t nearly as exotic. It was just Nikki making a story to go along with his face, not something she was supposed to do in sessions, but she was off the clock. On the clock, if she made assumptions based on a kid’s angelic face, she might forget that that same kid had seen more carnage than most active military and end up saying something that hurt the patient, or herself.
Nikki was bad with the names of the staff. And remembering the Mercy House residents she’d met? Forget it. They were a blur of gray eyebrows and wrinkles. This was one of the reasons why Nikki liked working with teens. With tattoos and wild hair, kids took great pains to distinguish themselves from their peers, something that helped Nikki remember them if time passed between meetings.
There was a pause after Don finished, and Gail was caught with her mouth full so she couldn’t jump in with a reply. The salads and soups around the table were nearly depleted and the lunch lady—now in a conservative dress—was clearing plates.
Harriet wanted to claw Nikki’s eyes out. The evil bitch kept her smile pressed tight, not wanting to look too happy, too pleased with herself and her dark magic manipulations.
She broke her stare away from the girl long enough to look at her son. There was a smile on his face, too, as he gesticulated, telling the story of how he met his darling wife. You try to raise them as best you can, and at a certain point you may have even fooled yourself into thinking you’d succeeded, but sooner or later they find a way to disappoint you. Then—at the end—they lock you away to add insult to mortal injury.
Harriet could feel the anger surging through her. It came in waves lately, and part of her rational mind knew that it wasn’t just an emotion but a symptom. Her frontal lobe was destroying itself, the damage headed backward toward the rest of her brain. It was part of the reason she felt angry all the time, at least more angry than she used to feel, and also the reason that her lips were cracked and bloody no matter how hard she tried to stop licking them.
Pick’s hadn’t ever manifested itself like this before, as a dark cloud at the end of the room that felt so real she could almost see it, did see it, flickering in and out of existence like a kind of static. But maybe the cloud was a combination of her disease and the fact that it was her Abandonment Day.
There was a lull and Harriet decided to speak. It was her party and she would ruin it if she wanted to.
“What’s your deal? How do you like it here?” she asked the redhead next to her. The woman’s makeup made her look like a Dickensian hooker. She smelled like a slut, too. She stank of too much makeup and some kind of ointment and wasn’t fooling any man with that wig. Sniffing the woman reminded Harriet to ask, “Does the stink get any better?”
“The smell. Do you get used to it?” Harriet asked again, the flesh around her lips red and cracked, even though Nikki hadn’t caught her licking once since they’d been inside Mercy House.
The redhead looked at Harriet, her hands becoming fists on her silverware, her eyes looking red, close to tears. She didn’t speak.
“Come on now, Beatrice. You’re usually such a chatterbox. Tell her how you like it here, all the friends you’ve made.” It could have been Nikki’s imagination, but the emphasis on friends seemed suggestive, an inside joke that Gail was sharing with the rest of the staffers, or maybe just herself.
Beatrice brought her head around slowly to regard Gail. It was the motion of an old dog, cloudy in the eyes and gray in the face, turning because it heard its name called.
“Well, I’m not quite sure what it is you’re smelling, Harriet. You may just be adjusting to new surroundings; you’ll get used to it. Rest assured that it’s very clean here. We know what an adjustment it must be,” Gail said, turning to the big man, who wasn’t standing on ceremony for the rest of their entrées to be delivered before digging in. “Do you smell anything new, Paulo?” Ah, that was his name; he’d just put special emphasis on the Pao sound when he’d introduced himself.
The big man swallowed, the sound a cartoon gulp as he forced down a lump of steak he didn’t have a chance to properly chew.
Before he could speak, Beatrice did.
“No. She’s right. It stinks. Rot. Fucking moldy cum loads left on shit-stained sheets,” she said.
Gail dropped her fork; her makeup unable to conceal the blush of her embarrassment.
There was a beat, and then Chairwoman Gail Donner gave her best public relations laugh. Nikki felt herself leaning forward in her seat, desperate to hear how the woman was going to attempt to spin this outburst from Beatrice.
“Probably not the worst thing you’ve ever heard, with one of you working construction and the other one spending her day around teenagers, eh?” She nodded at both of them separately as she spoke. “We have a colorful environment here and encourage our residents to express themselves. It sometimes manifests itself in, uh, interesting ways.” She laughed again and this time the staff around the table joined her. The sound was loud enough for Nikki to notice the contrast as the residents weren’t sharing in the moment.
The entrées were set down in front of them now, steak for the staffers, Don, and Nikki, and what looked like baked cod for the elderly residents. Their dish was a softer food but looked no less highbrow.
“What’s this?” the woman to the left of Gail said.
“It’s Chilean sea bass with lemon, Marta,” the lunch lady said, leaning over the old woman and readjusting the plate, as if the issue was with the old woman’s vision, not the dish.
“I want meat,” Marta replied.
“Well, you know how tough steak can be,” Gail said in response, nodding the lunch lady away. The chubby woman exited the dining room with an overly formal combination of a bow and a curtsy.
“I want meat in my mouth, too,” Beatrice said from the other side of Gail. This particular biddy seemed incapable of saying anything that didn’t carry a sexual suggestion. Nikki fought down a rising giggle.
There was something wrong with these women. If these were the residents that Gail had chosen to introduce as pillars of the Mercy House community, Nikki tried to imagine what the rest of the population must be like.
Don gave her thigh a squeeze under the table and the playful touch reminded Nikki of better days, when the world and the people in it were a sitcom performed only for the couple’s entertainment. Those were the days when there would have been no suppressing their laughter at two randy old women fighting over meat.
“If your speech therapist clears you for steak, if she says that you can handle it, then you can have steak. But not until then,” Gail said, a flash of what she must be like, without a family watching her, slipping through. In one quick statement the woman demonstrated that she was more than capable of sternness, maybe even cruelty, when it came to dealing with the residents.
There was a change in the room’s lighting as the red bulb over the door illuminated solid for a moment and then began to flash.
“That’s me,” the doctor said, his voice sounding bored and zonked out. He stood and pushed in his seat, scurrying out of the room.
Gail, realizing that all eyes were on her, nobody too concerned with whatever emergency the red light denoted, course-corrected her tone. “So maybe next time you’ll have steak, girls.”
“No. Now,” Marta said, her voice gruff. The old woman shot her fork out and speared Gail’s steak, dragging it over to her own plate without pulling the dish closer, the steak leaving a wet splotch on the tablecloth as it passed.
“Oh man,” Don said, the glee in his voice the same as when he used to try to get Nikki to watch disgusting YouTube videos on his phone. She’d always watch, wanting to join in the shocked revulsion, but playing hard to get was part of the fun.
Beatrice stood as Gail Donner dove to wrestle her steak back from Marta, grabbing for the old woman’s fork hand but missing and catching a fistful of mashed potatoes instead. Don’s reaction was right, this was the stuff of Internet legend, comic gold. And them without a camera. Nikki’s sides hurt from holding in her shocked laughter, the air inside her swelling until she just decided the hell with it and let it out.
“No, it’s mine,” Beatrice said, creeping up behind the two seated women. She was not holding a fork but one of the steak knives that had been lain out in front of her. The old women would not need knives to eat their fish, but they had been placed in an effort to make the table symmetrical, make the residents feel included.
Nikki caught herself, cut her laugh sharply in half as Beatrice lowered the knife straight into Gail’s hand.
The blade was driven down with such force that it impaled Gail and cracked the china underneath her palm. Blood, fresh and bright, spilled out from the mashed potatoes, threatening to envelop the steak before Marta lifted her fork and took a bite out of the meat, not fazed by the attack happening inches from her.
There were stunned exclamations from the staffers, Flores shouting Spanish words that sounded especially colorful. But only one of them took action and it was the huge physical therapist, Paulo.
“Stop,” he said, his voice a tone that Nikki heard regularly from security guards trying to break up teenage scuffles. If there was a fight at the center, which there were with regularity, Nikki was not supposed to step in. Aside from the physical danger that the teenagers posed to her, she could be legally responsible for any and all of the kids’ injuries if she didn’t wait for a guard’s help to pry them apart. You didn’t lay hands on the patients, not ever.
With the length of his stride, Paulo required only two steps to cover the ground between the end of the table and Beatrice. The old woman’s face was pinched together in concentration as she dug the blade deeper into the wood, wiggling the handle to widen the gash, like she was trying to split Gail’s palm completely and give the woman a forked hand.
Paulo didn’t notice Marta’s attack in time to stop it. He was too busy trying to wrestle the knife away from Beatrice or Beatrice away from the knife, whichever. The frenzied old lady had planted herself, and was forcing the huge man to come from behind and lift her up from the waist with both arms. It was a pro-wrestling suplex that he was having little success with, since Beatrice was holding on.
With Gail stuck in place, quite literally, Marta had no problem stabbing her in the belly while they both remained seated. It was a prison attack. Marta hadn’t switched to a knife but instead used the fork to stab Gail repeatedly, her arm a blur of motion.
Nikki felt a warm droplet of blood hit her cheek, all the external stimulus needed to coax out a scream.
The other staffers were out of their seats now, but too preoccupied to help the chairwoman. Don, Nikki, and Harriet stayed seated, the events around them becoming a violent and surreal dinner theater. Nikki looked over at Don but his eyes did not leave the ruin that had been Gail Donner’s stomach. There was something glossy and tubular now visible between the slashes as Marta pulled out the woman’s intestines with the tines of her fork.
At the far end of the table, the steaks now unattended, the two elderly residents not engaged in manslaughter had lowered their faces to the plates and were chewing at the filets. A bald man was so intent on his meal that his upper dentures detached as he pulled against the fat with his hands, a row of teeth sliding out of his mouth and leaving a trail of drool and strings of spent dental adhesive.
Nikki’s eyes went beyond her husband’s face, a terrible shift in focus that revealed Harriet now on all fours, crawling from her chair, not bothering to push the chair out but taking the most direct route to them, climbing over the table.
“Don!” Nikki was able to get his name out and point a finger in the old woman’s direction.
Harriet was heading straight for Nikki, that much was clear from her sight line and trajectory.
Don, like she always knew he would if he had the chance to prove it, put himself between Nikki and harm’s way, a brave protector. No, maybe bravery didn’t even enter into the equation. Maybe protecting Nikki from Harriet’s attacks had become so second nature to him at this point that the fact that Harriet was now brandishing a knife was irrelevant to Don, a detail that didn’t register as possible.
“Mom!” he yelled, and then there was only the glint of the knife as Harriet raised a hand to cut through him to get at her real target.
Don’s head cocked back and his blood fanned out above him, like a sprinkler that had been kicked out of alignment and would waste a great deal of water if it wasn’t turned off.
Instead of moving toward her injured husband, Nikki’s chair tipped and she fell backward. In her mind she thought that if she came into contact with more blood, it would once again jar the world into clarity, make these events real.
Across the table, Paulo still had Beatrice in a bear hug, her feet off the ground but still armed with the knife. Flores stood behind them, her arms outstretched in an ineffectual I got you position, ready to catch him or the woman, it was unclear who her target was.
Displaying tremendous strength that was at odds with her slight frame, Beatrice placed both feet flat against the edge of the table and pushed, sending the table sliding over Nikki’s head, obscuring the action on that end of the room from view.
Nikki tumbled behind and rolled toward the nearest wall, flattening herself against it. She was trying to get as much distance as she could from the carnage, possibly a moment to reassess what was going on. Harriet and Don had been jostled by the sliding table and the pair was now hitting the floor.
Harriet’s mouth was on her son’s slashed neck. It was a bizarre mouth-to-neck, and it wasn’t meant to resuscitate. Harriet lifted her face and Nikki could see that her mother-in-law had been stopping up Don’s neck wound with her tongue. Harriet moved to speak and a fresh gout of blood rushed forth.
“Steak,” Harriet said, locking eyes with Nikki while her lips spread wide for a toothy grin, blood on her teeth, running down the sores of her chin.
A rush of action on the other side of the room forced Nikki to look away for a second. The toothless man was as finished as he was going to be with his steak and he leaped from his chair, taking two handfuls of Flores’s hair in his greasy fingers. Flores shouted something that sounded like a rushed prayer, as the old man slammed her face into the hardwood floor then snapped her neck midway through a word that began “Sant—”
The other staffer, a man with kind eyes who hadn’t said a word during the dinner, was not so quiet now. He screamed as an old woman, done with the cooked meat, buried her head in his crotch in a mockery of fellatio while slashing at his chest with her knife. Seconds later his pant legs were a mess of gore as she reached up to lift his shirt, burying her hands into the wounds she’d caused. Her fingers, in him now, found his rib cage. She pulled down with a sickening crack once she was able to snake her fingers far enough in to find leverage, exposing the inside of his chest.
Paulo’s head swiveled, ricocheting back and forth from the dying to the dead and then settling on Nikki. He appeared to make some kind of decision as Beatrice bucked in his arms, trying to get into an angle where she could stab him with her flailing strikes. He extended his arms and flung the old woman against the wall where she hit and bounced, collapsing into a heap.
Paulo was bounding over the table as Nikki felt wet, warm hands close around her neck. Harriet was upon her, her rage and strength both alien and familiar, awe-inspiring and terrifying.
Her mother-in-law was going to kill her.
Like these other old bats, Harriet wanted meat, too. But dark meat, still squirming as if she would cut off a slice of it, just like Nikki had cut the soul and love out of her boy and replaced it with resentment.
Harriet could see the dark aura around the girl now, the force that Nikki had used to corrupt her son.
She had her suspicions before but now she was sure of it. The power was voodoo wielded by a high priestess of manipulation. Nikki was a witch who spent her days teaching her methods to the mongrel children of her insipid race, trying to destroy the country, the world, one “youth center” at a time. All these connections sprang together, only vague feelings, a knowledge that the girl was no good made concrete by the clarity she felt on her Abandonment Day.
Harriet picked up her knife and began to climb across the table, no path direct enough, no legs powerful enough to speed her on her way with the quickness that she desired. Her thoughts were a divine jumble, more ideas than a thousand books could contain, all of them spilling through the fingers of her mind.
Donald turned toward her, said something, a scream that ended in an almost imperceptible curl of the lips. Insubordinate and past the point of saving being two of ten thousand similar thoughts that Harriet heard before lashing out with her blade.
She wiped that all-knowing grin off her son’s face, part of her horrified that she’d done it with a knife and the other part, the bigger part, wanting to lap up his blood, feel it splash on her face, needing to scream that she’d brought him into this world and now she’d decided to take him out!, while looking into his dying eyes, but unable to find the words.
When she was done drinking, unable to stand the anticipation of cutting that black whore’s scalp from her body any longer, she crawled toward her. Harriet’s muscles tensed and twitched, feeling stronger with every breath.
Every molecule of oxygen she got into her lungs was immediately rerouted everywhere that she had needed it for so long. Her deflated frontal lobe knitted itself back together, the wrinkles returned. Nikki looked like she might make a run for it and Harriet almost wished she would. Want to race, daughter of mine?
Her hands were on Nikki, the blood of her son that had blazed white hot just a moment ago beginning to go cool and sticky, feeling like ice as it oxidized, coagulated, and evaporated.
She should have kept her eyes on the rest of the room, kept her situational awareness and not been so damn cocky. The big man grabbed her by the nape of her neck and tore her off her quarry, sending her crashing into the table as he and Nikki slipped out the door, the bolt of the lock clicking behind them.
Staggered, Harriet took a moment to watch the ceiling spin as if she’d just drank a quart of vodka. Lying there, she could feel an ache in her bones. The change was not only in her imagination but physical, as if she was experiencing a teenager’s growing pains on fast-forward.
When she could stand no more, had wasted enough time, she regained her footing and renewed her death oath.
There was nowhere the evil bitch could run that Harriet wouldn’t follow.