Outrun the Night

Kathy’s been shot. Round up the usual suspects. (Italics) While Daniel finished dinner, Kathy pulled a small notepad from her handbag and began a list of anyone and everyone who might want her dead. Dale topped the list. Eventually, she was going to find out who shot her, and God help them when she did. Thirty minutes later, she stared at the words, “Dale The Therapist,” wondering why she had written them down. She had no face to go with the name. She had also written the names, Susan Rutherford, and Patrick Marney. Shrugging unconcernedly, she put the pad away, knowing that tomorrow she might not even remember she had written in it. She had learned quickly there was nothing she could do about a mind that was still in reverse and was selective with where it chose to wander. She held on to the present, the sights and sounds of each moment. Scrunching into a strategic corner of Daniel’s couch to flip on the TV for the 6 o’clock news, she clicked the remote—weather report, click, sports, click, world events, click, a bill was up before the Senate for something or other, and the U. S. was still in smackdown with the Middle East... Click. Kathy stared at the remote in her hand, at the button. Reaching into her purse, she pulled out a thin little rectangular black box the size of a cell phone—a little box with one small button. Click, nothing. “What is this?” she murmured to herself as she gave it a gentle shake in her palm. “I’ve been carrying it around with me ever since I came to with my head in a turban and my brain in a shroud.” She dropped it back into the handbag, and opened the photo album. For some reason, there were no pictures taken for the rest of her thirteenth summer, the rest of that year, and the following year. Why? Kathy remembered that she had taken it upon herself to rescue the memories that had been stashed in drawers and forgotten in closets when her mother gradually stopped putting photos in the album, but the missing years would have been added as photos taken with her own camera. She had “purchased” the camera with green stamps she collected from grocery purchases and diligently saved in the little stamp books that would add up like dollars. Even her grandmother and one of her aunts helped save them for her, so she could redeem them for “purchases” from the reward catalog. So why had she not taken more pictures? Curiously, she gazed at a later picture, when the photography began again. Lou and Daniel and Jim and Darnell were holding new rifles, bright and shiny, with gleaming barrels reflecting the Christmas tree lights behind them. Kathy touched each face with her fingertip. Lou and Daniel and Jim and—Darnell. The anger again, flaming within her as she looked at the Conlon boy, but she still did not know why. Blond hair, blue eyes, a serious smile, tall for his age—and one nail-driving sharp shooter. And she took off with him in the middle of the night after she found Daniel at the old Wilson place with Crystal. But that’s all she could remember of Darnell so far, other than his name evoked a desire to punch him in the face. Not exactly the warm, fuzzy feeling she was looking for in her lost childhood’s friends and family album. “What do you remember, Kathy, about that picture?” Daniel asked as he came in to the room and glanced at the page. “I was a virgin?” she said, smirking playfully. “Well, I guess that’s a start,” he returned. “Henry was in Vietman,” she murmured, drawing her fingertip over the faces of the boys again. “I was fourteen. You were on your way to seventeen.” Then with a provocative smile, she said softly, “I wanted to ‘hunt like the boys.” Discreetly leaving out one, tiny detail, that he had made her melt like snow hit by a blow torch that day, she described the trek to the gulch the way she remembered it, and finished almost breathless at being able to remember it so vividly. “Did I remember it right?” she asked eagerly. “Most of it,” Daniel said simply. His tone held a strange quietness, edged again with the sadness that was beginning to tear at her heart. Apparently, either something was wrong with her brain’s version of the past, or pieces were still missing, pieces he wasn’t going to fill in for her. Michael’s orders. She had to find her way, fight her way, back to the present, on her own. “Oh,” she said suddenly. “Henry wasn’t in Vietnam. It was – 1981…so where was he?” “He had moved to the city. But that’s not…” Lilly’s picture flashed onto the television screen and Kathy’s attention swept towards the newscast. Co-workers from Our Lady of Victory hospital were expressing their shock that the recently-hired, outgoing lab technician would have any kind of gun in her hands, much less a shotgun! Kathy leaned in towards the television, staring at the hospital grounds intensely, her eyes glued to the screen, searching every inch, every shot of the crowd. Then her gaze moved to the sculpture of the Virgin in front of the hospital. Something was familiar…She wished the man in scrubs and a hoodie who was leaning against the pedestal wasn’t blocking so much of the statue as he stood with the rest of the curious crowd to watch the news crew… The backdrop switched back to the earlier videotape of the rainy freeway ramp. Fortunately, she was nowhere in any of the shots. “You look like you’re searching for ghosts, Kathy,” Daniel said as a reporter began talking about Lilly as ‘the woman scorned.’ “Are you looking for specters in the rain?” Perhaps, she thought as the Virgin in stone haunted her.