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A SET OF KEYS JANGLED in my hand. The keys were my lifeline. One of them would be what saved the day. I held onto them as tightly as I could.
I was being followed. The man running behind me was my stepdad, Morris Heyward. He was holding an axe.
I didn’t want to look over my shoulder to see how close he was getting, and I didn’t have to. I could hear him. Since the yard had not been mowed in weeks, the weeds were high and made a swishing sound against his jeans.
I wish it would have been as easy as calling for help, but my phone was useless; the screen was shattered. Minutes earlier, Morris had yanked the phone from my hand and crushed it with his steel-toed boot.
I followed a foot path into a slim set of trees and could already see the street lights on the other side. Soon after I emerged from the tree cover, the tall, uncut grass gave way to scattered gravel around the edge of the train tracks. My bare feet stumbled over the iron rails. I nearly tripped but managed to catch myself before I fell flat on my ass.
There were no cars on the road. It was nearly midnight. Nobody drove through the small town of Ridge Spring, South Carolina at that time of the night.
To my left was a line of businesses. The buildings had been built in the 1800’s when the town was founded. My destination was straight ahead.
Heyward Pool and Supply was located in what had once been a gas station. The streetlights reflected from the windows that stretched across the front of the brick building.
I grasped the keys tighter in the palm of my hand. I was almost there.
I had picked up the keys by accident. In a panic to get out of the house, I’d grabbed the wrong set, but after trying to unlock my truck door, I realized my mistake. And so I had made the decision on the spot—I would go to the store.
The smooth, black asphalt of the parking lot was a relief underneath my bare feet. As I got closer to the front of the building, I could see my reflection in the glass. I was shirtless and wore a pair of jeans. My chest was smeared with drying blood. I caught a glimpse of movement behind me. I knew that what I was seeing was Morris.
After turning the key, I pushed the door open, slipped inside, flipped the lock, and spun around to face what was behind me. There was no sign of Morris anywhere. I stumbled through the dark store. I knew that there was not a phone on the property. For years Morris had been using his cell as his business line.
Everything smelled like chlorine and plastic. Giant, inflated pool toys—a whale, alligator, and an inner tube—hung from the ceiling tiles over the main aisle.
I helped at the store after school and on the weekends so I knew my way around. I made my way into the stockroom and crouched down between the desk and the bathroom wall.
This gave me a moment for things to begin to settle in my brain. For the first time, the sickening realization of everything settled over me.
My best friend—Davey Steep—was dead.
He had been killed with an axe. The same axe that Morris held in his hands now.
Davey’s blood was smeared across my chest. The thought nearly caused me to puke, but instead, I started to cry.
I reached to the top of the desk and fumbled around until I found what felt like a thin rag. I grabbed onto the piece of fabric, yanked it down, and knocked over a cup of pens and pencils in the process. I realized that what I was holding was a company t-shirt. As I tried to clean the blood from my chest, the cotton fabric only smeared the half-dry blood and pulled at the hairs on my body.
Then I heard the loud shattering of glass from the sales floor. Without seeing the action first hand, I knew what had happened—Morris had made his way into the store.
I jumped to my feet and bolted across the narrow stockroom, pushing through the back door in a matter of seconds.
I made my way around the building to where a display model of the store’s bestselling in-ground pool was standing on a trailer that had been parked on a thin strip of grass next to the highway. The nice, curvy shaped pool—The Big Dipper—was strapped to the trailer so that it stood upright, making the inside visible to passing cars.
From out of nowhere, a weight crashed into me, knocking me sideways. I landed with a thud against the inside of the pool display.
I tried to stand up and fight my way past Morris, but his free hand was reaching and grasping at me. He shoved me back again. When I landed against the pool, I felt the entire thing shake. I grabbed onto the edge and pulled myself forward only to meet Morris’s attack again.
I felt the shift of the pool against its restraints. My butt slid across the smooth fiberglass as the whole thing began to fall forward.
Everything else happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to think. There was a brief moment when Morris wasn’t fighting me. Instead, there was a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face, and he was frozen in place. When he looked up, a dark shadow swept over him.
The pool had come loose from its strapping and was falling on top of us. There was only a split second of my understanding this fact before instinctively shielding my head with my hands and falling to the ground. The pool landed with a loud crack and covered the two of us in darkness.
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A TOWN UTILITY WORKER found me at daybreak.
From underneath the pool, I heard a man’s frantic voice as he made a phone call. Then, just a few minutes later, there was the sound of vehicles and slamming doors.
“Move as far back as you can,” a woman yelled out to me. “We’re coming in with a forklift right about here.” Through a narrow gap that was between the pool and the ground, a flashlight beam danced around the grass. I scooted as far away from the light as I could and watched as two enormous metal prongs were pushed toward me.
When the overturned pool was finally lifted off of me, I saw that a small crowd had gathered around the scene. I heard shocked gasps from several of the onlookers.
I was placed onto a stretcher that several EMTs immediately began to roll away. I looked toward my stepdad’s broken body that lay on the ground in the same spot where the pool had fallen on top of him. I tore my eyes away from what I was seeing, and when I flopped my head to the other side, I was met with the faces of the crowd.
Mixed in with the expressions of concern and sorrow, there was something else that I saw on the faces of the spectators. It was judgment.
From there I was sent to a mental hospital where I was kept under close watch, and a woman from Social Services was assigned to work my case.
After two months in the hospital, Social Services placed me to live with my father until I turn eighteen and free to live on my own.
My parents got divorced when I was five. Mom remarried when I was seven and then died in a car crash five years later. After Mom died, Morris had been given custody over me.
I don’t remember much from the years when Dad, Mom, and I had all lived together. There are only small, brief images that come to mind when I think about that span of time—a white picket fence, a small baby goat, and the green tops of carrots growing in a garden.