How I Met Henry (on hold)

Chapter 28

While seated at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette, I stared at the contents of the padded manila envelope. The Polaroids Henry had sent were inside an unsealed letter envelope, and a Post-it note was attached to the videotape. Numerous questions ran through my mind.

What exactly was on the tape? Was I about to come face to face with my parents after 23 years? Were they alive, or had Henry already killed them? I had no desire to see Philip, but if that's what Henry wanted, there was a purpose for it.

The note on the tape read, 'Watch me first. Don't look at the Polaroids until I tell you to.'

"Okay," I mumbled, crushing my butt in the ashtray.

Henry had to have a reason for the order in which he wanted me to do things. He always had a reason for everything. As I headed into the living room with the videotape, my stomach rolled and my palms began to sweat.

I turned on the TV and VCR, shoved the tape into the machine, and pushed play. I chewed my lip while I waited for something to show on the tape. Static scrambled the screen, then Henry's handsome face appeared. 

My heart fluttered. Fuck, he was attractive. Those deep cobalt eyes, sharp jaw, and soft curls of his wrecked me. I hadn't seen him in person for a few days, so he looked sexier than usual. The void in my chest which had materialized over the last few days deepened.

'I miss you,' I thought desperately.

"Where the fuck did he even get a video camera?" I blurted. Images of him robbing the 7-Eleven flashed through my mind, and I shook my head. "He prolly stole it."

Henry adjusted the camera to where he wanted it to be. It was aimed at his face, upper body, and lap area. He was in a different car than the one I had previously been in. He had probably heisted it. Henry lifted a lot of things. The car was an older model than the one he owned, a different color, and much roomier. He was sitting on the passenger side.

My old neighborhood shadowed the background. The trees had grown taller and fuller; some were wildly overgrown. The houses were older and in poor condition; a few had been abandoned and boarded up. The area had turned seedy and gone downhill considerably. Crime numbers had been pretty bad there when I was a child, but by the look of things, those figures had upped drastically.

Brandon Shores Power Plant, which sat on the Baltimore City line, loomed off to Henry's right. The taller smokestacks no longer pumped out black smoke. Now, the shorter ones bellowed steam. Sometime in the '70s, the Government had changed how power plants ran due to too much pollution. As a child, I had been fascinated by those smokestacks, yet frightened at the same time.