Trying the Knot Read online

  Trying the Knot

  by Todd Erickson

  Copyright 2013 Todd Erickson

  Smashwords Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Electronic adaptation by www.StunningBooks.com

  The Eighties are dead! And maybe a bridesmaid too. At the dawn of the Nineties, six recent college grads reunite for a hometown wedding. On the eve of the ceremony, the bride's stepsister sleeps with the groom and then overdoses on pills. Getting hitched without a hitch? Not likely, for this crew.

  Table of Contents

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  chapter 21

  chapter 22

  About the Author

  chapter one

  part i – stray

  Labor Day Weekend, 1991

  As the morning sun infiltrated the room, Nick forged toward semi-consciousness. In his torn, grass-stained underwear, he languished in the heat. Too exhausted to draw the blinds, let alone crack a window, he shielded his eyes from the sunlight with the crook of his one arm draped across his face. The room reeked of stale beer and cigarette smoke. While growing up, the air had been thick with the sweaty smell of rambunctious adolescence, but now he was an invading stranger in this bedroom that had incubated him into adulthood. The September air was as stagnant and suffocating as a forgotten fallout shelter.

  In the distance, a telephone blared incessantly. Scratching his chest, he automatically reached to turn off an alarm clock that was no longer there. He peeled open his eyes, pried his tongue from the roof of his mouth and recoiled. It was as if the sunrise had reversed the hands of time, and he was back in high school; imagining his parents upstairs in their twin beds mortified his newly minted adult sensibility.

  Provoked beyond the threshold of his hung-over patience, he rolled out of bed and searched for the cordless phone that had disappeared into the cluttered recesses of his past. Kneeling on the hardwood floor, he steadied himself using an old desk where a few small game skulls had found their eternal resting spot alongside the hunting knife he used to disembody them. He had long ago abandoned these dusty mementos of his boyhood. Positioned near the phone jack, he reeled in the cord as if it were a fishing line. He used to employ this trick hourly during the height of his teenage popularity. To his dismay, he retrieved only half a phone.

  “Damned cordless fucker,” Nick raged under his breath. He kicked a suitcase full of soiled clothes across the floor. To his pained surprise, his foot found the telephone. His head throbbed and stomach churned as he hobbled around on one foot trying not to put any pressure on his sore toe. He was so dehydrated it was hard to breathe.

  Attempting to grab the blaring phone, Nick capsized in a dizzy whirl spin and landed near a broken stereo topped with a few sticky cassette tapes. Although his shoulder felt all one hundred eighty-five pounds of his hearty frame, he managed a cordial, though albeit agitated, “Good morning.”

  The line went dead.

  He hurled the demonic instrument and winced when it bounced off the knotty pine paneled wall. The impact caused a rifle leaning forever in a corner to fall in his direction. Not two minutes later, his muddled brain was once again besieged by penetrating screeches. He scrunched his brow and crawled across the hardwood floor, which felt like broken glass.

  This awakening was more harrowing than when his sister used to stumble home in the middle of the night and fart in his slumbering face. Nanette was perhaps the most beautiful female specimen Portnorth had ever produced, but she considered small town beauty a curse. Her only compensation was indulging in shockingly crude behavior generally overlooked by an adoring public. Throughout their formative years at every twisted turn, Nick’s easy-going nature was the perfect foil to thwart his sister’s subversive disposition.

  Elbows digging into his knees, he eased himself onto the edge of the unmade bed and stroked his naked pecs, which he often wore like an indelible fashion accessory. Defeated, he ran a hand through his sandy brown hair and said amicably defeated, “Again, good morning.”

  “Oh, thank God,” she trailed off as her voice wavered distressed. “Something awful has happened, Nick.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just terrible.” Kate’s sobs made it impossible for her to continue.

  Bracing himself, he wondered what mishap could have rendered his bride-to-be so inconsolable on the eve of their wedding day. Awaiting her to regain composure, he thought maybe the DJ had backed out, or the caterers quit, or her dress was ruined.

  “It’s okay, Katie, honey, whatever it is, can be fixed. We’ll just work around it,” he said as if their wedding cake had merely slipped out of the hatch of her aunt’s station wagon.

  As if reading his thoughts, she replied, “No, it’s nothing like that. This is serious. So very awful.”

  “Well, what is it then?”

  Something so awful she could not utter the words. “I don’t understand why, why she would do a thing like this.”

  “Do what, who did what?”

  “It’s so senseless.”

  Growing alarmed, but also intrigued, he inquired, “Honey, what’re you talking about? What’s going on?”

  Her whimpers of distress digressed into full-fledged sobs, and mounting dread seized his entire being. While she attempted to speak, his mind raced over the events that had transpired last night. Finally, he asked, “Where are you?”

  “I-I’m, oh, God, at the hospital.”

  “The where?”

  “The hospital, Nick, we’re all at the hospital.”

  “Is my dad or mom working in the ER?”

  Unable to form words, Kate passed the phone to whomever she was with, and Nick hoped it was his father, or mother.

  “Nicholas, it’s me,” Chelsea said with curt authority. “A bridesmaid has tried to kill herself.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Evangelica.”

  “Huh?” he asked in disbelief.

  “It’s Vange, she’s in a coma. Get ready, because Benjamin and Thaddeus are on the way to pick you up.”

  Thinking how obnoxious Chelsea was with her way of calling everyone by their full names, he asked dumbfounded, “Chels, why the hell –

  Misinterpreting the direction of his inquiry, she cut him off. “Because Katherine’s a total mess, near hysterical. That’s why, Nicholas. Your dad wants her to take a Valium, but she refuses.” Before slamming down the phone, she added reluctantly, “We need your help, so get your ass here A-S-A-P.”

  To the dead line, he muttered, “Uptight bitch.”

  Not exactly a pacifist, but in many ways a human pacifier, Nick despised all forms of tension. Generally, his mere
presence was enough to quell even the most disharmonious situations, but Chelsea was too wound up for him to work his magic.

  Sitting on the edge of his boyhood bed, he shook his head unbelievingly. Feeling an upward surge in his gut, he cradled his abdomen, which gurgled with the fermenting remnants of last night’s party. He collapsed backward onto the down-filled comforter and rubbed his hands over his face. Shutting his dry eyes, he scratched his testicles with such intensity it seemed as if he had discovered a new hangover cure.

  Lying on his back in his underwear, his stomach convulsed. He had inherited his nurse mother’s tendency to put on weight while his sister was as reed thin as their doctor father. When his midsection accrued unwanted flab, he merely jogged the excess padding away unlike his mom, who packed on the pounds in order to repel his fitness fanatic dad.

  Before long, Nick found himself kneeling in front of the toilet. He repeatedly heaved until his insides erupted with such force the regurgitated booze and bile splashed back at him. Shakily, he mopped the puke-polluted toilet water from his face. He remained on his knees clad in his vomit-splattered, grass-stained underwear, until well after the bile and booze was expelled from his stomach.

  What the hell was she thinking?

  Nick assured himself Vange’s alleged suicide attempt had nothing whatsoever to do with him, or with what transpired between them last night. They had hooked-up for old time’s sake. He and Vange had a twisted sort of relationship, they were merely old friends who fooled around occasionally. Nothing more needed to be said. Screwing outside the tavern was just as natural an occurrence as all the other times when they had too much to drink, run out of conversation, and found themselves conveniently alone. There was no reason not to let it happen, he rationalized; after all, he was not married yet. Hell, the ring would not be on his finger until tomorrow.

  “Damn her,” he muttered to the puke-filled toilet.

  It was positively creepy she would pull a stunt like this on the day before his wedding to her own stepsister. He had no inkling as to how she landed in a coma, but last night he had intervened to prevent her from drinking herself senseless. He surmised this alleged suicide attempt had to have been an unfortunate accident. Just maybe, he thought, she inadvertently wound up comatose when the alcohol flooding her system collided with a miscalculated dose of sleeping pills. It happened all the time; it even happened to his mother once. His dad told him about it long after the fact, at about the same time they were speculating whether or not she was a closeted lesbian.

  Despite his limited access to the most vague details, he reasoned it had to have been an overdose. Vange was not the kind of person to slit her wrists and watch herself die – she could not sit still long enough. And her legendary vanity rendered any sort of disfigurement out of the question, which meant drowning, jumping or hanging were not an option. He could not imagine her fashioning a noose and trying the knot.

  Rubbing his eyes, Nick hacked up the phlegm lodged in the back of his throat and regretted having smoked so many cigarettes. Thad kept handing them to him for lack of anything to say. Kneeling before the toilet, he could still smell the traces of her perfume on his bare chest.

  In the moonlight, her pallid shoulders shone luminescent while her sad eyes flickered, ablaze with determination. Leaning against the tavern, she tossed an empty plastic cup in the bushes and lit a joint before handing it to him. “Here, you might as well indulge in a few vices before you’re taken into captivity.”

  He took a hit of the weed. Being with her seemed more clandestine now that they were practically related. They had not hooked up since before Kate’s father married Vange’s mother. Leaning against the tavern, he arched his back and closed his eyes in anticipation. She rolled herself onto him and snarled seductively before chewing open the buttons of his shirt. She littered his chest with kisses until her teeth found his left nipple. He dropped the joint on the ground where it smoldered, wafting between them like incense. As she wrapped her heart-shaped mouth expertly around him, he doubled over in ecstasy, thinking he was being swallowed up into heaven.

  As she stood up, he palmed her breasts and hiked her short dress over the curves of her full hips. Reaching between her fleshy thighs, he pressed his wrist against the wetness he found there. As he cradled her buttocks with his open hands and lifted her until their mouths met, she wrapped her legs around him. Half naked and shivering with chilly nighttime desire, they fumbled to the piss-soaked earth. The sweetness of the fresh cut grass intermingled with the briny wet soil to concoct an intoxicating aphrodisiac.

  As Nick thrust his way inside her, she recalled, “I saw your mom in church last week.”

  “What?”

  “She only noticed me because I was wearing cashmere,” Vange laughed.

  “Could we please leave my mother out of this?” he asked perturbed, and she clutched his shoulders as he cupped her full breast in his large hand.

  “Then this time make it last forever,” she whispered, before twisting her tongue into his ear. A master at seizing the moment, she skillfully maneuvered her way on top without missing a beat.

  As always, they relished every moment together. Sport fucking in the hinterlands was a recreational pastime that provided each of them with more of a charge than almost anything else. In fact, it was about the only thing they ever really had in common, besides their mutual disdain for team sports. Since high school graduation, he had evolved from an all-American jock into a medical student, and she had grown from a teen tart into a small town tramp. He was college educated, and she was a beauty school drop out. But at one time in the not-so-distant past, they had pursued a sexual charge from half the high school population. Their overblown reputations, his as a stud and hers for being a slut, were the culminating results of their efforts. Of course, most of their pursuits had amounted to furtive groping sessions in the dark, no doubt embellished or minimized by their respective dates.

  Evangelica, despite her rather evangelical name, considered her reputation her birthright, as her mother was the local floozy; however, Nick found encouragement in his exploits from his father, who was inclined to take in frequent dips into the sullied waters of extra-marital gratification. For fear of bumping into one another with their respective dates, father and son once covertly juggled the family cottage between them. Their shared observation was getting them on the pier was a sign of a sure thing. Nick heard a rumor once his mother tossed one of his dad’s mistresses off their docked pontoon boat into the lake. Vange, on the other hand, only ever heard rumors of her mother being a home-wrecker or occasionally a kept woman. Although it would never occur to Vange to compare seduction tips with her own mother, she had found herself sharing other things, mainly warding off the unwanted attention of more than one of her mother’s suitors.

  Taking his father’s advice, Nick bagged most of the small town babes while they were in their prime because they tended to grow haggard too soon after high school graduation. In the ensuing years, since encountering the real world, most of his teen-aged conquests had descended into small town domesticity. Evangelica, of course, was the exception as it was her nature to break all the rules.

  Last night’s hookup with Vange replayed in his mind on an endless loop as if their drunken tryst in the dirt had lasted a mini-eternity. Flooded with such feelings of nostalgia, Nick nearly forgot his periodic one-night stand and future stepsister-in-law now lay comatose in the hospital.

  Charging footsteps sounding on the stairs startled Nick upright. He cast Vange from his mind and left the bathroom to greet his two former high school buddies. In truth, he could count on two hands how many times he had spent with either Ben or Thad since high school. But as with most milestones in his life, his wedding was an opportunity to gather around fixtures from the past in order to measure exactly how far he had come along in life. Once reunited, it was as if nothing at all had changed in the past five years.

  “What’s the prognosis? She’ll be okay, won’t she?” he as
ked as he stepped into a pair of faded corduroys. With no answer forthcoming, Nick looked bewildered and asked, “How’d she do it?”

  “Pills,” Ben answered. He was too antsy to see the look of relief flash over Nick’s face.

  “So, it was an accident?”

  “Not a chance, man. Your mom said she swallowed enough pills to drop an ox.” Wrinkling his nose, Ben asked, “Hey, you going to shower, or what?”

  “You think I should?”

  Ben anxiously widened his dark almond eyes and tossed his longish black hair about as he shifted from side to side. The chain on his black leather coat rattled to the beat of his impatience. The word Substance was etched in faded letters on the back of the well-worn coat.

  “Didn’t you wear that back in high school?” Nick marveled as he searched for a shirt.

  “Hey, what’s wrong with my coat? You gave it to me!”

  “Nothing was wrong with it, but it’s the Nineties,” Nick said. “Besides, I was ordered to get my ass to the hospital A-SAP.”

  “Chelsea,” Ben said her name, and he twisted up his warring factions of Irish-Asian American features as if he had swallowed something foul, “is being a total snatch.”

  Half Irish and half Vietnamese, Ben was a simmering stew of multicultural diversity. The running joke was he was the melting pot personified. Regarded as a likable enough eccentric by Portnorth locals, he tried to assimilate by dressing more like a hick than even fourth generation natives, but his exotic appearance dashed any hopes he ever had of ever becoming an authentic, Grade-A local yokel. Although his antiquated leather jacket helped advance the cause, since it illustrated how out of touch he had become since moving back to Portnorth.

  “How’s Kate holding up?”

  “She’s hysterical,” Ben answered, bouncing off the walls with hyper-kinetic energy.