Page 10 of Jacob Michaels is Dead

“What the hell is going on?” I gasped, finally pulling my hands away from the dashboard. “Lucas—”

“FUCK!”

Lucas ripped the driver’s side door open and leapt from the car. Before I could react, he was stomping towards the front of the car. Quickly, I turned in my seat so that I could open my door and leap out of the car to chase after him. The last thing I wanted was for Lucas to march off into the darkness in a rage—for whatever reason—and then have to spend even more time in Ohio. When I turned to get at my door, my eyes darted to look out of the windshield once again. Lucas was standing in front of the car, his fists balled up in rage as he stared off at the side of the road.

What the fuck had caught his eye?

That’s when I saw the sign.

“YOU’RE NOW LEAVING POINT WORTH, OHIO. THE SMALLEST TOWN WITH THE BIGGEST HEART. HOPE WE MEET AGAIN.”

What the actual fuck?

When I was a young boy, my mother loved playing music whenever she did any chores around the house. Of course, her favorite bands and artists were from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Sometimes she’d played some 90s rock and pop, but more often than not, bands like The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, The Police, The Pretenders, The Mamas and the Papas, Bruce Springsteen, and John Cougar Mellencamp would be heard coming from whatever device she was listening to music on at the time. From a very young age, I couldn’t remember the house not being full of music, dancing, and laughing as my mom puttered around, doing everything she could to make it a happy and fun home for my dad and me.

Mom would wash dishes as Don’t Sleep in the Subway by Petula Clark played in the background. Her hips would shimmy, and her feet would never stop moving as her head rolled around, and her hands washed and dried dishes. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I grew up in the late 90s and early aughts, this wouldn’t have been that odd. The fact that my mother was born in the late 60s—thus, had not been born, or at least, had not been that old when a lot of her favorite songs had been recorded—was odd, too, I suppose. However, my mother loved the music she loved, and there was no point in questioning it. Of course, I was very young when my mother was still around, so I didn’t know at the time that her taste in music was unusual for her age. I just loved the happiness and dancing. I loved that, as a child, my mother encouraged me to dance and sing and prance around the house, carefree and happy.

My mother encouraged my father to react with happiness and joy instead of anger and frustration when he was having a bad day. Instead of raising voices or complaining, we would eat and listen to music. Then we would dance and clean up as a family, though I was too small to really be of much help. Then I would groan as my parents shared a kiss at the sink, happy to be alive, married to their favorite person, and to have a home we all adored. My life with my parents was brief, but it was joyful.

It was the childhood everybody should have growing up.

But then my mother mostly disappeared from my memory after something…strange…rattled and shook our house. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic by The Police had been playing when it happened. I don’t really remember the exact moment that was the last time I saw her, but I remember being in the kitchen with her when the house began shaking…then I was being put to bed by my father.

The following morning, he was gone, too.

And a strange woman was there in his stead.

Why had my parents left me?

Where did they go?

Why would someone do that to such a young child?

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Lucas chanted angrily as he stared at the sign and I slid out of the car in disbelief.

Instinctively, I wanted to go to Lucas and comfort him, to calm him down and keep him from getting more upset than he already was presently. I wanted to tell him that maybe he had just somehow driven in a circuitous route and brought us back to Point Worth. No big deal. We could get back into my car—maybe I would drive this time—and we could head out for Cincinnati again. Looking over my shoulder as I stood alongside my car, I knew that doing any of those things would be pointless. I could see the lights of Point Worth behind us—as if we had just left.

“Babe,” I asked hurriedly. “Did you ever make any turns?”

Lucas was squatting down in front of the welcome side, his head in his hands as he rocked on the heels of his feet.

“No, no, no, no.”

“Shit,” I mumbled.

We had never left Highway 2, which ran straight through Point Worth. We would have been on a straight shot from Point Worth to Cincinnati with barely any twists or turns. The only way we could have ended up where we were is if Lucas had taken a turn, driven south, back west, then in a northern direction before turning east back towards Cincinnati. And he would have had to drive through Point Worth again in order for us to see the sign indicating the city limit of Point Worth. We hadn’t gone through Point Worth again. We weren’t finding ourselves by the sign due to some mistake on his part.

Magic.

Not the good kind.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” Lucas was kneeling now, his hands on his knees as he rocked and cursed. “Oh, fuck, Rob.”

“Hey.” I shook my head to clear my negative thoughts and overall sense of impending doom. My gut was sinking towards my ankles. “Babe.”

Hustling over to Lucas before he had a complete nervous breakdown, I squatted down in front of him. His head was in his hands again as the headlights of my car illuminated partially illuminated us. I reached out and pulled Lucas towards me, and he practically fell against me, as if he had no strength left in his body. Whether or not he was freaked out by the fact that he had driven for over an hour and we never even got out of Point Worth or the fact that how screwed we were was suddenly dawning on him, I knew that I couldn’t let him fall apart. I wasn’t sure why my brain wasn’t slowly turning to mush—I had every right to flip my lid—but I just wasn’t surprised.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had known that we would never get out of Point Worth.