Read Lakebridge: Spring (Supernatural Horror Literary Fiction) Page 32

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  Ben waved back to Stephanie, who was tersely polite even though she would never forgive him. She had been a good friend once, especially after Virginia had died. He spent night after night with her and Roger playing Scrabble. He hated that damned game. All those words. He would sit and stare at the tiles for what seemed like hours. He’d get lost in the combinations. He knew there were words there, but they constantly eluded him. And the ones that he saw would always remind him of Virginia and he would never play those even though he could hear her voice chiding him for losing the good score.

  He imagined her ghost sitting over his shoulder sadly sighing as he missed opportunity after opportunity. She was the competitive one and would force him to play all those silly games even when he would rather be focused on his work. She said he needed some good old-fashioned fun and would forcefully sit him down in front of Monopoly. He hated that game above all others…there was no point in it. You just moved your damned shoe or car or whatever around the board and randomly landed on things and paid for them or paid someone else for them until you proved what? That you could roll dice better than anyone else or pick a better card than anyone else? It made no good sense and people just got angry at it because someone rolled the dice better. Virginia hated to lose to him because he didn’t really care and she knew it. But she’d still make him play because she loved to win. Of course, any game that involved chance meant that Gil would be banished from the room, if not the house. Whenever she got the bug to play, she might casually make a suggestion to the boy.

  “Gil, dear. Do you think you could spend the night over at a friend’s?”

  “Which friend, mom?”

  “Is there a friend you’d like to visit with?”

  “Not really.”

  “What about Will?”

  At this point, the boy usually got the picture. If Virginia was willing to send him off to the Kurtz house, then she must really want him gone. “You know, mom. If I’m sitting at the table, only Dad doesn’t get good rolls.” The boy knew his limitations.

  “I’d just prefer to play without your dark power about mucking things up.” She called all that bad luck Gil hauled around with him his “dark power” as if he was some kind of medieval wizard from one of his games that he never seemed to do very well at playing. But Ben would never fault his son for not trying to overcome whatever it was that decided to plague him. Gil also had the best humor about it, like it was something that he had to deal with and sulking wasn’t going to change it. It’s what Ben and Virginia loved most about the boy.

  Just as Ben never blamed the boy for his dark power, he didn’t blame him for Virginia’s death, even though she was surely a victim of it. Something about Gil and cars didn’t mix and they really tried very hard never to drive him anywhere. But he did have a tendency to get hurt and they reluctantly would take him to the closest doctor around, except on Sundays, of course, when they’d have to go a bit further on, to Burlington on occasion, to get him to a hospital for his latest break. Most of the time, it was Ben who took the boy. Virginia had a continual prediction that one of these days she’d be taking the boy somewhere and his dark power would finally lash out in her direction and that would be the end of her. When she’d call him, there would always be that bit of fatalism in her voice as she said goodbye and told him she loved him. He never forgot to return the emotion.

  “I’ve got to take Gil off to Burlington. It looks like a sprain, but we need to check it.” She was a good mother and always cautious.

  “Be careful, dear.”

  “I will. I love you, Ben.” He supposed those were the best last words he could have from his wife.

  “I love you, Gin.” Those were the best last words he could speak to her.

  He didn’t know much more than the car crashed and the boy survived and she didn’t. Gil said he had no memory of it and Ben never pressed the issue. He didn’t need to know every detail of the accident. It didn’t matter. All that did was that she was gone and Gil thought it was his fault and Ben had never been able to do anything to change his mind about that. There was no way he could know every little thing, but he did know that he loved his wife and he missed her still and would trade just about anything for one more game of stupid Monopoly with her.

  He watched Stephanie make her way into Osno’s in his rearview mirror. He worried about Roger. He had been sick for a few years now and the doctors kept trying new pills on him. When he was still a welcome guest, Roger would laughing read over the list of possible side effects of the medications he was taking. He continued to believe that if the mysterious illness, the “Creeping Sick” as Roger called it, didn’t kill him, the pills would. He actually started believing that the Creeping Sick was a disease that was fed by the pills, which were constantly changing it and making it evolve into something stranger and, sometimes, worse. Each new pill was a transformative event in the life of the disease, twisting it and reshaping it into an ache or internal bleed or blurred vision. Roger blamed his poor performance at Scrabble on his inability to see the tiles correctly. He said sometimes they would rearrange themselves into demonic messages, but he would never tell Stephanie or Ben what those messages were. He said that the things the Creeping Sick had to tell him were for him alone and it had warned him that if he spilled the beans, the Sick would make him take a different pill to bring about some awful new side effect. Ben had been out of the loop ever since the election, when the invitations for Scrabble no longer came.

  “When you come to your right mind and start being Sheriff again, then you can come and play and eat my food. Until then, Ben Hamilton, we’ll have none of you.” Stephanie had not minced her words.

  Ben turned back to the road. Seeing Gil today. Seeing the continued hurt in the boy’s life. He knew it was time to talk to him and settle what was between them. If something happened to either of them and he didn’t tell Gil how much he loved him, that he didn’t have those as his last words with the boy, he’d never forgive himself.

  And for some reason he had that awful, twisted up feeling that told him something bad was coming and he didn’t know if it was coming for him.

  Ben went to the intersection to make a proper U-turn. He didn’t give much thought to the ugly old chartreuse Chevrolet sedan driving past.