I clean rooms once a week for the residents. After every overnight guest, I sneak spare towels from my maid’s cart to our new friends, which earns me extra tip money. I don’t mind working hard scrubbing bathtubs and sinks. It is trivial enough and keeps my mind from worrying.
Big Rosie and Tom help us further by giving John as much side work as they can, and he stashes any extra money to buy me small gifts. The west side of Collins Avenue is filled with a mix of coffeehouses, shell and rock shops, and seedier non-ocean-view X-rated motels. Collins Avenue’s massive four-lane stretch is busy in the daytime and busier at night. John holds my hand to dodge traffic so we can wander the gem and rock shops to browse through piles of lapis lazuli, malachite, and quartz in search of just the right piece.
“Oh! Look at this!” I hold up a bloodred necklace. “It’s beautiful, John!” Polished beads of garnet spread the light into an intricate, fractured spray of burgundy.
“Here. Let’s try it on, baby.” He gingerly places them around my neck and steps back admiringly. “Oh! Nice. Here—for you!”
“John. Really?” I gasp.
“Your birthstone, Dawn. I have to. It’s the perfect piece!” He digs in his pocket to pay the storekeeper with every dime of the extra cash. “Nothing’s too good for my girl!” His nostrils flare with the fierce pride of ownership. But it is to be a false pride.
Come October, John finds an outside job on the construction site of a large four-star hotel about a mile north on the beach. He gives his employer a fake name and makes up lies about losing his Social Security card. Hired as a minimum wage laborer, he begins every day early and ends late.
Somehow, for the first month or so, he arranges to borrow money from fellow workers, weaving stories about paying them back as soon as management straightens out his paycheck. The guys figure he earns the money when he works with them; after all, he’s a nice guy, so they think he has to be good for it.
John plays his bluff at the job like an addiction for as long as he can, banking on the odds that something else will come up in the meantime, before the obvious lie catches up to him. His mood is still happy and sweet, and he and I take it to mean that landing this job is a good omen.
I feel as if our roles are on level ground with each other; it’s a place I’ve never experienced with John, and I find a sense of strength in it. He makes his own lunch the night before work. In the mornings he wakes himself, setting the alarm to wake me later. He kisses me good-bye tenderly every morning, as if it might be the last time, before walking out the door for work. At night when he returns more tired and drawn than usual, he keeps our dinner visits at Joe’s brief so we can cuddle in front of the television and fall asleep in each other’s arms.
It is subtle at first, John’s mild detachment from meals and conversation. The change goes relatively unnoticed by everyone, except me. But his excuse of being too tired makes sense, diminishing my alarm. Like a slow-starting avalanche, his need for more privacy builds up to irritability and then sleepless nights. John is changing again.
Is he beginning to crack from the pressure of being on the run? I guess it’s catching up to him. I hope no one will notice and try to cover for him when people notice he isn’t his friendly self. “He’s fine. He’s just tired. They’re working him too hard over there,” I tell Big Rosie and the gang. It doesn’t help that people are beginning to get suspicious of his stories at work too. John is running out of ideas, feeling trapped, and I think about the possibility of having to move somewhere else. I hate to lose the small corner of comfort we have etched out here.
It is Big Rosie with her no messing around personality who approaches me to say that John might be on drugs. I don’t know when I suspected it; too many other excuses have clouded my vision.
Big Rosie brings it out into the open with me. “He’s asking all kinds of questions about where you’ve been all day and if Tom and I have seen you with anyone else. He’s being weird. Then he acts like we’re lying!” She shakes her head, demonstrating that she doesn’t like this change one bit. “I’m worried about you both, Dawn. You don’t think he’s using anything, do you?”
It can only be one thing, my gut screams. He must be doing drugs! Not a lot, ‘cause it’s not full-blown, I rationalize. He’s still managing. I can’t figure out where he’s getting the drugs, but I’m becoming scared. Just ride this through, Dawn. He won’t do anything here. Everybody knows us, and we see each other every day. I assess the situation around me in an unconscious act of self-preservation.
Distance grows between us again. He doesn’t sleep at night but stays up listening to the noises outside our door. John is so paranoid that I find it hard to say or do anything right. The sound of walking on eggshells plays on repeat in my mind like the lyrics to an old song I know by heart.
The other locals notice as well. I keep making excuses. “He’s worried about money. They’re having trouble with his paychecks.” Offering to help, Armand the male stripper pays me extra to clean his room an extra day a week, and Louise hires me to babysit her five-year-old till she gets home from her shift around two in the morning. It earns us extra money and affords me time away from John’s brooding, but it also allows him all the more reason to distrust me.
November has begun, and John’s depressive mood swings are disturbingly obvious to everyone now. He stops speaking to most people, refuses to eat, and holes up in our room complaining about the jerks at work. He goes to work regardless of whether he has slept or eaten, and he returns home each night bleary-eyed and reclusive. Then, one evening near Thanksgiving, John snaps and breaks his promise—the one that means everything to me—and crosses that invisible line into insanity again… the likes of which I haven’t seen since before the murders.
Slipping into our room after a night of babysitting, I turn to close the door quietly so I won’t wake him. Something’s not right, I think, noticing Thor isn’t dancing at the door to greet me. “John?” I call into the darkness.
“Where have you been?” The terrible, low tone of his voice reaches ominously from behind the door.
Startled, I jump. “Oh! John? Is that you?”
“Who’ve you been fucking?”
“What?”
Quickly his hand lands over my mouth, and he shoves me up against the wall. “Don’t give me that shit, bitch. I know you’re out fucking someone!” he whispers harshly, his breath like fire in my ear.
I don’t fight. I hold still. Disjointed emotions barrage my thoughts and, of all things, I irrationally panic that our new friends will hear us. Beneath his weight, I shake my head feverishly.
John’s voice, thick and heavy, orders me to be quiet. Then with eerie, precise movements, he pulls my hands up and behind my back, rendering me paralyzed. No. Not again. My internal alarm clangs. Shattered images of my life here at the Fountainhead play behind my eyes squeezed shut and splinter at my feet, a useless pile of a thousand pieces.
I can feel John’s rage grow from his body, and I snap into autopilot, shrinking into the size of a pea, smaller even, cutting off all external connections with my thoughts and feelings. I can’t let anything in. It’s the only safe place to go. John’s other palm, rough and calloused, clasps firmly over my mouth. The smell of concrete and sweat infuse my nostrils, and I want to vomit.