Chapter 343: Katrina XI—We Should Talk
So another year had passed last night. Katrina tried to remember last night clearly, and she supposed she did. She had been to three or four different parties with various friends of hers drank heavily at each one and in the morning had the cracked lips and headache to match. Yes, the New Year was always shitty like that wasn’t it? Her apartment smelled like cigarettes and she could see an entire bowl full of butts and the empty package on the carpet. The plastic on the box looked new. Running her tongue over her teeth, she could taste the smoke, so at least she knew the cigarettes were hers.
Most of the day she spent sleeping until she went out for lunch at a small deli. She watched a young woman and a child, a child too old to be her own, a sibling perhaps? They shared a large sandwich, the girl giggling and talking about nothing important. Katrina wondered what Chloe was doing, with any luck the girl was singing spirituals in a church choir and declaring her New Year’s resolutions on a sheet of paper with crayons. Well, no, would Chloe be too old for crayons now? She’s twelve now, or thirteen?
Christ I
can’t remember my sister’s age! What the hell was her birthday? Well of course,
that was easy, New Years, her birthday was New Years and that’s why Mom thought
she was so special. A baby born at
But she
learned how to cry fast enough, never at Parfet or
Mom but at little dead animals, dead insects, even a dead unwatered
plant. She’d hold onto that hair of hers and scream and shriek. The only one
Katrina exhaled. Something inside of her told her that Clinton Parfet had killed the little girl, he’d gotten fed up and whacked her brains out with a frying pan or something and when Mom came home, he killed her too. If that was true, then she felt the intense regret at not plunging that knife deep into his abdomen, sunk a line across his gut as if he were a cake and sliced a hunk of fat out, let him bleed to death on the bed like the useless man he was.
Chloe’s alive, Katrina told herself. She’s alive. It would be easier if the little brat were dead, then I wouldn’t have to think about her or care anymore. But did Chloe ever do anything easy? Adopted to a good home, said like that, as if she were a puppy or a cat. Don’t worry about her, she’s fine… she’s fine….
Katrina closed one eye and tilted her head back. She had no time to worry about her sister who probably had it good, spoiled brat. Chloe had the devil’s luck, that little girl who was convinced she was a walking angel.
Scott Parker’s voice startled her when she got home and clicked on the answering machine for her messages. “Hey Trina, I was wondering if I could call ya up, maybe we could get together, heh, do you like beer? We could go out for one. Call me at….”
Katrina lifted an eyebrow. He had to be kidding. Of course she couldn’t be too surprised could she? You smile once at these dogs, make something even slightly close to meaningful eye contact and they’ll follow you all the way down the street. See, there was the lesson Mom never learned. Don’t take home the dog that follows you after one glance.
The second message was from Patrick Roy, and Katrina frowned. Now that one was interesting. His lower back had been killing him since last night, he said on the message, and he knew that she was off hours but he would pay her extra for her troubles if she would just work on it some today. He really was in an incapacitating amount of pain and he had a game tomorrow. Could she call him on his cell phone?
The third message was from a rather nasal voiced, young sounding man who identified himself as Father Mallory from the Catholic Church somewhere downtown, Katrina forgot the entire complicated name of the damn place as soon as she heard it. The Children of Saint yadda yadda or whatever they called themselves to feel more important. He asked if she would find it out of her way to talk with him and could he please expect a call from her, this is concerning important, personal business. Katrina rolled her eyes, yeah, probably trying to feel me up for donations or something. At any rate she couldn’t remember ever meeting a Father Mallory, maybe sometime last night she got drunk enough to promise him some sort of favor at a party. Perv….
Katrina thought about it, at normal rate, she would be making… she knew Patrick as a generous tipper. Well, what else did she have planned for today? She replayed his message and wrote down his phone number. There, now she had something to do. As for the rest of the messages, one click of the button and they were erased. Patrick answered rather quickly after she dialed his number, and Katrina yawned, “So what’s bugging ya hon? And why is it so important.”
Patrick’s eyes were half closed when Katrina let him into her apartment. He had a rather comical face, crooked and droopy in spots, and one of the most expressive ones she had ever seen on a man. Today the tired upslope of his eyebrows, the grimace on his mouth accentuating boyish dimples, told her that pain did indeed wrack his body. His hands were shoved deep into his coat pockets, his head hung on his drooping neck as if he were a tired stork, his shoulders slumped forward like a man slugged in the gut.
Amazing how he didn’t resemble at all the man that she barely remembered when she was a child, the man who had cared enough to help her mother. Well, he wasn’t a man back then, a skinny, mop headed boy, and really she didn’t see much of him. Why he even helped Mom was beyond her. Wickedly, Katrina thought that perhaps he had more than a casual interest in Mom, perhaps there was a story there she didn’t know. But somehow she couldn’t see Michele allowing a liaison like that to happen.
He smiled weakly, “Hello,” he said in French, “Thanks again for going out of your way, really. It means a lot.”
“It isn’t a problem,” Katrina said easily, “But you could have easily called Greg or Pat, or anyone else, they have a little more experience than me.”
Patrick wrinkled his nose and closed one eye only to have it flutter back open. Katrina noted with some amusement, he had a cowlick feathering up from the back of his head, not unlike that comic strip boy who made everyone’s life a living hell. “Well, they would help me, yes, but they would also recommend to management that I sit out a game or two to rest, and when the medical men get into it, I don’t have much say as to when my playing time is. I was hoping that I could expect a little discretion from you, as a favor? I know all I need is to have these damn muscles loosened and I can play.”
Katrina nodded. “Well I have the table set up right there, I’m going into the next room to get some oils and just call me when you’re ready. You can hang up your coat over there, or throw it on the floor, I don’t care.”
Patrick smiled. “Good.”
The sound of him pulling off his coat jogged Katrina’s memory and she turned around. “Oh, Patrick another thing.”
Patrick’s eyebrows slid up his forehead, his eyes struggling to stay open. “Yes?”
“Try anything funny and I’ll break your pinky, good?”
Patrick laughed. “Good.”
“Miss?”
Mom’s nose smashed, flat against her face like a broken triangle, blood everywhere, Mom’s dead. Find her…. Find your sister.
“Miss?”
Screaming, clutching the sides of her hair, screaming, as if she had never screamed before, as if she had never cried before. Perhaps she had never cried before, not like when she cried for Teddy. Hadn’t thought about Teddy for years now, she wondered if that nice, brown haired lady kept him safe or dumped him at the first junk sale she could find. Her eyes stung with tears thinking of Teddy tattered and cold, falling apart in a junk yard, betrayed and abandoned.
“Young Lady!”
Katrina startled and opened her eyes, momentarily not knowing where she was. She sat up, ran her tongue over her lips, blinked, felt so tired, felt so much pain, her arm twitched, the bruises on it glaring. Yes, on a couch, a soft one in a lush waiting room with a huge guggling salt water tank, soft new age music, magazines. A woman stood over her, the receptionist, pink fingernails, blond hair piled on her head as if it were a tall ice cream cone. “What?”
The blond grimaced. “Ms. Waters will see you now, young lady, and I suggest you not make too much trouble, no matter what your grief is. Things will be better for everyone if you show her a better side than you’ve shown me.”
Katrina stood up and held her hands behind her back. “Yes, Ma’am. Thanks.”
She rolled her eyes as she followed the receptionist down a long hallway. Her lean thigh muscles screamed with tight soreness and trembled with pain. Her back and shoulders were kricked and throbbing, and her arms, those hurt the worst, splotched with finger bruises as they were. With the added ingredient of Clinton Parfet’s blood and her own spotting on the hem of her skirt, some of it still caked on her inner thighs, Katrina could understand the receptionist’s initial unwillingness to show her in.
And this Goddamned altitude! Every other second Katrina had to put her hand to her chest and catch her breath like an asthmatic. Conscious of this situation, Katrina pulled her hair back and flipped it into the hair band she had forgotten was around her wrist. There really wasn’t much else she could do. At least she had thought to wash her armpits in the bathroom sinks of every rest stop she had come across, so she didn’t stink that much. Still, a shower sometime would be nice.
The receptionist opened a honey colored door, “Here’s the young girl, Ms. Waters, you asked to see her.”
“Thank you Lara, you may go.”
Katrina glanced at Lara and then stepped away from the door as the young woman closed it behind her. Ms. Waters sat at a desk, a shining black one covered in folders and files. Ms. Waters had auburn hair and red lips, and red nails and she wore a red dress suit, her fingers interlaced and Katrina felt a momentary flash of panic. Already she knew she was in over her head.
“You may sit down, dear,” Ms. Waters said and Katrina felt her skin crawl noting how the woman’s mahogany eyes looked her up and down and obviously rested on her breasts before looking at her again. “What is it you wanted to see me about? I don’t recognize you and that’s odd because I recognize all of our models in this state, I personally sign each one of them. But those gorgeous eyes, yes I’m sure they’re familiar. I’ve seen those eyes. What’s your name, dear?”
“Katrina Volanges,” Katrina said without thinking, hating herself for not making up a name. God knows if the police or child services were looking for her this far into the country. It wouldn’t be that hard to call her name in now, into a database and be carried back home. Would she be charged as an adult? Would they believe her? Whose blood would speak louder? Clinton’s or her mother’s or her own?
“Katrina,” Ms. Waters said as if licking each letter. “Lovely. Lovely. I couldn’t have thought of a better name.”
She thinks it’s false? Katrina felt a sigh of relief in her breast. She clutched her fingers tightly behind her back. “I’m here because…”
“Well of course no one is supposed to hit you,” Ms. Waters said quickly, and she stood up, lean and wiry under her clothes, opened a filing cabinet. “You’re much too young for that sort of treatment and the fact that it was allowed to happen to one of our models is out of the…”
“I wouldn’t be in there,” Katrina cut in. “Don’t waste your time I’m not a model.”
Ms. Water slammed the drawer shut and turned around, her cheeks pale her eyes narrowed and Katrina knew that she would never see her sister again. “Who are you if you don’t work for us? How did you get this address, this number?”
Katrina
reached into her purse and pulled out the blood stained, crumpled card. “This.
Address, number, I rode a bus all the way from Atlanta, I haven’t slept much or
showered in days, I’m tired and I want my sister. I know you have her,
Ms. Waters lifted her eyebrow. “Perhaps we can talk…”
Katrina sat down on the soft chair her fingers dug into the arm rests as if she were clawing it, “Yes I think we should.”