Free The Lost by Jack Ketchum Page B

melodramatic. Her whole damn family was doomed. Heart disease or cancer, one or the other, was going to get all of them sooner or later. Her mother had died of breast cancer when Jennifer was six. Her big brother John had a heart attack at the age of twenty-six. Dropped dead right in the middle of cleaning his customer’s windshield. He wasn’t even overweight. She was eleven years old. Her father died of lung cancer when she was ten and her older sister Ann had been diagnosed with a brain tumor just last year. The tumor was in remission but Jennifer knew it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t.
    Something very nasty was going to get to her too. It was only a matter of time.
    When something like that was waiting around the corner for you she guessed you could pretty much put up with anything.
    The foster homes. Ray. Anything.
    But this, the way he was acting—it was just so goddamn boring .
    “Come on. Forget about this Sally person, will you? Let’s go out and have a good time. Let me call Tim and Phil and tell them you changed your mind. Come on. Please?”
    She was whining. If you could whine and try to shout at the same time, then she was doing it.
    She hated herself for the way she sounded.
    “Why should I let you call and say I’ve changed my mind, Jennifer? I haven’t changed my mind. Fuck Jim Brown and fuck Raquel Welch. I am not in the mood. Period. It has nothing to do with Sally.”
    “Oh, no?”
    “No.”
    “Ray, you only get this way when there’s something you want and can’t have it. Sally whatsername’s not it? Then tell me what is it.”
    “Get off my back for chrissake.”
    She walked over to the stereo and turned it off.
    He looked at her like she was crazy. She guessed it was a little unusual for her to stand up to him.
    “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? I’m into that.”
    “I want to get out of here, Ray. Anywhere. I want to go to the movie. Can we please just go to the movie? I want out of this apartment!”
    “You want to get out of the apartment?”
    “Yes.”
    “There’s something wrong with the apartment?”
    “No.”
    “What’s wrong with the apartment?”
    “Nothing. I didn’t say there was anything wrong with the apartment.”
    “Then what the fuck did you say?”
    “I just . . .”
    He drained the bottle of beer and walked over to the sink. She was glad to have the distance between them when he got nasty like this. He stubbed out the joint and placed the roach carefully on the edge of the ashtray.
    “What’s wrong with the apartment, Jennifer? You don’t like the color? You want me to paint it for you, maybe? You don’t like the decor? You want me to redecorate?”
    “Jesus, Ray. I just . . .”
    “ I want I want I want.”
    “What?”
    “ I want I want I want . You want to get out of the apartment? Then get your fucking ass out of the apartment.”
    “C’mon, Ray. I just want to see the movie, y’know?”
    “Here’s the movie, Jen. I’m the fucking movie. The movie’s right here! You get it?”
    Then suddenly he was moving, smashing the bottle on the edge of the sink and coming toward her with the broken green neck of the thing held in front of him like a knife and she backed away from him all the way to the door, not really thinking he was going to use it on her but scared of him anyhow, it was absolutely right to be scared of him when he went into a rage like this because you couldn’t tell what he’d do, it all came on so fast and furious. He reached into her hair and pulled her head back to the door and held it there and pressed the broken bottle sideways to her cheek. She smelled the dregs of beer inside flat and sour.
    Her cheek was wet but it was only beer. He hadn’t cut her.
    He let go of her hair and dug into his jeans.
    She didn’t move a muscle. The bottle lay flat against her cheek.
    He took out his keys and handed them to her and then he lowered the bottle.
    “Here. Take the fucking car. Call your little friends. Get your sorry