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It didn’t take Tom too long to connect the dots between the missing supplies from his factory, and the explosion at the school.
“I knew it, I knew that was you!” he said.
Then the next thing Fidelity knew, her head was through the drywall in the kitchen.
Tom always had a good excuse to hurt her, even if it wasn’t a good one.
Anytime she tried to tell anyone about Tom’s abuse, it never worked. He was always so talented at twisting things, making her look like a liar, like a disturbed little child.
Bless her heart, he would say.
She’s a very troubled girl, he would say.
She doesn't know what she is saying, he would say.
Then, behind closed doors...Well, you get the picture.
There was one upside to living with Tom though; the big booms and bangs.
Fidelity had become very found of the world of explosives that Tom had so involuntarily provided for her. It was a beautiful avenue for her rage, and without Tom, she didn’t have very many resources. So for years she toughed it out like a trouper, like a good little girl, like a saint, learning all she could, all the time, thinking about the little boy from the orphanage.
She hoped that one day he would come riding in, sweep her off her feet and save her from her nightmare. But six years of waiting somehow has a funny way of making you forget your fairytale moments.
Fidelity had been planning this day since she got here. She was eighteen now, an adult, a full fledged woman. It was finally time to leave Tom’s loving nest. The only decision she had left to make was whether or not she was going to leave him alive or not.
After a pulling her forehead out of the kitchen drywall, it was quite clear to her now what she needed to do.
Fidelity ran upstairs to get Tom’s gun. She knew where he kept it because he’d been threatening to kill her with it ever since he started drinking; ever since Fidelity’s Mother died; ever since he took her in six years ago.
Her lungs pumped air out like an over-heating engine about to blow. She ran into Tom’s vaulted ceiling bedroom, over to his nightstand and tore into it.
A drunken gibbering version of Tom's voice echoed from down stairs. “It’s all your fault! You killed her! If you weren’t behind that couch she would still be alive.”
Whenever Tom got really drunk he seemed to go back to that moment when Mother died. Like he was stuck there. All that was left of him was his regret, and guilt. He was an empty shell; a drunken slave to the bottle; the tragic sum of selfishness and wealth. What Fidelity was to Tom, was a legal obligation and a painful walking memory of her dead mother.
Tom’s lie to the cops from years ago echoed in her head. “I was saving her, she was in danger from her father.”
Tom claimed it was an accident.
Fidelity claimed it was murder.
Love, in their house, was just a joke that wasn't funny.
Fidelity had the upper hand here because in Tom’s intoxicated condition it would be difficult to climb half a staircase without falling and breaking some skull bones.
The gun was in a little wooden safe box. She didn’t bother trying to hack the electronic lock, throwing it across the room at a wall worked just fine.
Her bottom lip was split, right in the center. It dripped a thick line, fresh and hot and red, sprinkling the white carpet. Having sported over a dozen busted lips, Fidelity was used to the potent metal taste of blood. It was as familiar to her as breast milk is to a newborn.
The skin on her face still stung from Tom’s hands and her ears were ringing, but the thoughts inside her head rung even louder:
You’re a liar. It wasn’t my fault they died, it was yours!
I hate you!
Bending down over the broken pieces of wood, she picked up a Beretta M92F/S hand gun. She knew how to check if it was loaded because Tom once popped it open and told her that if she ever ran away, he wouldn't have to run after her, he’d just let the bullets do that.
For Tom, trying to scare her was almost as fulfilling as hurting her.
Fidelity rolled her thumb over the top bullet. There were nine of them in the cartridge, all lined up, ready to do their jobs like good little soldiers. The only down side to this was that she could only shoot him nine times, and she had no idea where he kept the rest off the ammo.
Tom's screams were getting louder. “Your father is a bad man Fiddle. He cheats on her constantly!”
Fidelity locked the weapon back together, grasped the handle tight and stood up.
As she headed out, her reflection on a golden framed wall mirror caught her attention. This young girl was looking more and more like someone she didn’t know. Sure, she was still pretty, but somehow she seemed darker, more pale and colder than she was used to. She leaned forward and examined her face. It was once a smooth, gorgeous work of art that boys would admire with wanting eyes. Now it was bloody mess with bleached blonde hair smattered on top and fake eyelashes somewhere in the mix. She thought about Mandy and Molly. Then she spit as hard as she could at the mirror and watched the bloody saliva drip down her refection. Then, just to make sure she still could, she smiled. That was something Fidelity checked regularly, she feared one day she would loose it completely.
Mother always said that singing makes all the monsters go away, she thought to herself.
She recalled Mother’s song lyrics from long ago.

They can take your hopes, your dreams, your light.
They can make you cry, all day and night.
But if you can keep your grin from dying.
Then in the end, it’s all worth the trying.

Fidelity could still smile, no matter how fake it was, and she did it for Mother.
She looked at the gun. It was now or never. she took in a deep breath and flew downstairs.
Tom was holding himself up with one hand on his Kuhn- Bösendorfer piano. In the other he had a golden glass of scotch that splashed around two ice cubes. On average, his scotch to blood ratio was way too much to just enough to survive and at that moment, it was even worse.
She could smell him from where she was, more than twenty feet away. He stunk like a dead man covered up by cologne and looked like an expensively dressed pile of gentlemen's magazines smothered in fake tan grease.
“Come sing for me Fiddle,” he said, “Like you used to do for your Mother and I, before she died.”
She hated when he called her ‘Fiddle,’ her name was Fidelity.
Tom squinted his eyes and took a sip. He sat down at the piano and started flipping through the music in front of him. Blood was poring out of a tear on his button down cardigan where she had used a kitchen knife to free herself from him just moments before in the kitchen. She didn’t know if he was too drunk to notice, or if he was just past the point of caring about anything. Either way wouldn’t have surprised her.
This was typical of Tom. One moment he would be swinging fists and the next giving out hugs, cash, or making jokes. If she were a doctor she would diagnose him with an extreme case of Bipolar-Depression with a dash of paranoid schizophrenia that can only be cured with a hefty dose of rat poison.
With both hands, she pointed the gun.
When he heard the cock of the hammer pull back he looked at her. He stared for a moment trying to focus his blurry vision. Then he began to laugh hysterically, the long hissy kind from the back of the throat.
“Oh, this looks familiar. You gona’ SHOOT ME this time?”
She wanted to say yes, but she knew how this game worked. He could take anything she said, turn it around and use against her; make her feel like she’s the one in the wrong. So she held her tongue and held her aim.
Then he yelled something that sounded like a string of profanity and excuses for his behavior, blended into one giant dare for her to pull the trigger. When he was angry and drunk, his ranting never made sense. It came out sounding like some off color French dialect.
Fidelity didn’t like his French, she didn’t like it at all.
This was it, this was her chance. This was for Mom.
She pulled the trigger and the glass in his hand burst into a hundred pieces, spraying the golden scotch everywhere. The bullet grazed the underside of his sleeve, no harm done.
He looked stunned for a second. Then he laughed again, stood up and began to slump towards her as fast as he could.
“Oh come on, you’re not even trying,” he said.
He lost his balance but quickly regained it by slamming his hand down on the high notes of the piano.
The loud musical shrill from the instrument made Fidelity jump. A tear came sliding down like a blade over her cheek. She closed her lids and pulled the trigger again.
The bullet flew over his shoulder, splitting through his ear, and hit one of the three crystal chandeliers hanging above the piano which sent it spinning, crashing into the other two, snapping off and splashing onto the marble floor.
“My EAR!” shouted Tom. He covered it tightly with both hands and screamed at her again. Blood oozed over his fingertips in waves as his veins and arteries pulsed it out. The look on his face was a paralyzing gesture of how could you, like he didn’t think she would do it.
“Wow, Your aim is incredible,” he said growled.
Fidelity wasn’t sure if it was her aim that was the problem, or if it was her sincere lack of commitment to murder. Just like her smile, it was there, but not really. Her mother would have said that that kind of a hesitation is what still kept her beautiful.
It only took Tom a few more seconds to get close enough to wrap his hand around her neck.
Tom had huge hands, and at the moment they were dripping with the blood from his ear. She could feel the red liquid sticking to her skin like warm spaghetti sauce as he overtook her. He could almost stretch his thumb and fingers all the way around her throat and touch the tips together on the other side, thats how big they were.
Her eyes were the size of pomegranates and her gun was trembling now, barrel deep in his abdomen. She noticed his shirt pocket was protruding out. It looked like he had all the car keys hostage in there, even her red volts wagon bug. He must have just grabbed them and stuffed them in there before she came downstairs, in case she wanted to run.
With his other hand Tom grabbed her wrists and told her to fire. He told her to do it. “Trust me,” he whispered. “You will feel so much better when I’m gone, when I’m with your mother again.”
Tom always knew what to say to save his own life, even if he didn’t want to live. It was then she lost the appetite completely. The thought of sending this man to her mother, wherever the dead people went, if there was such a place, sounded a million times worse then getting life for murder.
She dropped the weapon and another tear seared its way down.
If there was ever a moment that felt classically timeless, frozen and unpredictable, it was this one. She didn’t know what would come next. Another scar? A broken arm? Jaw? Maybe this was it for her?
Tom fell to his knees. His caps made a cracking sound on the marble floor and his dinner and alcohol came whirling up out off his stomach onto Fidelity’s brown leather high heals.
Fidelity tumbled backwards, tripped over a hallway tabletop and fell on her tail bone.
She watched him as he slowly blinked his eyes open, found the pistol, wiped the digested Filet Mignon off and pointed it.
Amongst all the irrational thoughts that came flooding into her mind at that moment, only one logical one stood out above all the rest.

Run...










CHAPTER VII

RUN