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All these years later, he was tired of being used. He was tired of being a drunk. He was tired of feeling like he was stuck in a loop of doing the same stupid shit, making the same stupid mistakes over and over.
Mr. Bichon always harped to him about the twelve steps and how you couldn’t get anywhere by skipping any of them. Admit your mistakes and make amends. He couldn’t even manage to get that right.
On Halloween night he had tried apologizing to Robbie Fontenot at long last, to do the right thing and to release himself from the weight of that guilt, and instead, Robbie Fontenot had ended up dead.
What a nightmare.
He started drinking more in a feeble effort to numb himself. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. That asshole Fourcade kept showing up, poking and prodding, trying to trip him up. Fourcade was smart and ruthless. Dozer was terrified to answer his questions because the detective could twist his words around and get him to say things he shouldn’t. His stomach was constantly in knots just thinking about it.
He’d had it. He wanted this over, one way or another.
He had waited almost all night, because he figured Fourcade had a deputy nearby, just watching for him to drive out of the trailer park so he could pull him over for driving drunk. But he wasn’t drunk now, not over the limit, anyway. And those night-shift deputies were about done and ready to head home.
Now was the time.
It was still dark. The morning was chilly with a light frost on the ground and a sheer veil of fog hanging in the air. He could see his breath as he went out to his truck. Lights were on in one of the other trailers nearby. The woman who lived there worked the breakfast shift at a truck stop on the highway to Lafayette. She would be leaving soon, too.
He pulled out the cell phone that he’d told everybody he’d lost and checked his traffic app where people always posted where they’d seen a po-po. Someone had mentioned a deputy on the road between Bayou Breaux and Luck, but that had been more than an hour ago, and no one had mentioned it since.
He needed to go. Marc was waiting. He was going to have to take his chances, because when Marc called, he had to jump to like a goddamn trained animal, he thought with disgust.
He started the truck and drove out of the trailer park.
—
How had his life gone so wrong? Marc wondered, as if he wasn’t at all responsible for anything that had happened, and the answer had nothing to do with him other than giving him back what he thought he deserved. As if he was and always had been an innocent bystander, even though he knew deep, deep inside that wasn’t the case.
And therein was the conundrum that was Marc Mercier—a brutally self-critical core wrapped in protective layers of narcissism and sociopathy as thick as cotton batting. A strange and useless being, desperate to save itself.
All he could think about now was how he was going to get his lifeback on track with no one the wiser about what a selfish, useless prick he was.
He would start that campaign today.
He knew he could only claim to be out of communication with the world for just so long before people decided he was an asshole, and he couldn’t have that. People were looking for him. People were worried about him. His mother would be about to lose her mind. And Melissa…Well, did she even give a shit? He doubted it. Did he care? Not like he should have.
They had met at Tulane. His first taste of freedom away from home. His first chance to be anyone he wanted to be, not Troy and Kiki Mercier’s favorite son, not the hero of Sacred Heart High School. It had been both exhilarating and terrifying to start from scratch where no one knew him, where he was just another student, just another rookie on the football team. All courtesy of a scholarship he shouldn’t have had, but he hadn’t thought about that at the time. He had only thought of himself. As usual.
All he had wanted at the time was out of Bayou Breaux, out of south Louisiana. It had been as if he could take a big, deep breath for the first time ever. He could reinvent himself, be whoever he wanted to be, aspire to whatever struck his fancy. For the first time in his life he had considered the possibilities of doing something new and different, going wherever he wanted to go. He didn’t have to be tied to this place. He didn’t have to be a junk dealer’s son. He could have a future away from his brother’s resentment and his mother’s cloying pride.
In Melissa, he had met a girl unlike any of the girls he had known growing up. She was from a prominent family, from a place as different from south Louisiana as could possibly be. She was smart and sassy and outspoken. She had believed in him, believed in his potential, without ever having known Saint Marc of Sacred Heart.
He had grabbed that opportunity with both hands and left behind the idea of his childhood self like a snake shedding its skin.
The trouble had been that in his new life, he had felt as muchlike an imposter as he had in his old one. It wasn’t really better; it was just different. The new Marc was just as much a phony as the old Marc, skating by on looks and charm. People were so happy to be fooled by a wide smile and a clever joke. They didn’t care to look deeper, where they would have seen nothing, because he was as shallow as a puddle after a spring rain.
God, he hated himself and the mess he’d made of his life.
What the hell did he do now?
He sat on the deck overlooking the water. The eastern horizon had just begun to turn pink beneath a band of midnight purple sky. Wispy layers of fog floated above the water like so many ghosts traveling aimlessly from souls unknown.
The camp belonged to some cousin of Dozer’s who lived up in Shreveport. The cabin was a single-wide house trailer raised up on pilings a good ten, twelve feet off the ground and wrapped around with a worn, weathered gray deck. The view off the front was beautiful—water like black glass studded with massive ancient bald cypress trees hung with ragged shawls of Spanish moss. He would have found it peaceful if the circumstances had been different.
He had come out there to get away, to think, to try to straighten out the mess in his head. He’d been a wreck inside since Halloween, a mass of nerves and fear and disgust. The tension between him and Melissa had become unbearable. The baby teething had ramped up the aggravation factor by ten. At work he’d had to contend with Luc’s relentless criticism and bullying. They had finally come to blows on Saturday. Then he’d gone home to Melissa’s bitching and yet another argument.
He couldn’t take it. He didn’t want to. He wanted out—of his marriage, of this mess, of his life—but at the same time, he was clinging to it all by his raw, ragged fingertips, terrified to lose any of it.
He had settled on taking a break for a day or two or ten. He brought his truck and boat out to Dozer’s cousin’s place and parked them, then took the Toyota and made his way back to town to be among people who thought he was great, who basked in his charm,who had no idea about the hollowness inside him. He could drink and dance and pretend for a few hours. But that hadn’t worked out either, the evening ending with Cody Parcelle busting him in the mouth for dancing with his wife. What a fucking mess. What a fucking failure he was.
