What’s left is my screen saver swirling against a blackness, hiding an empty page.
I set the box on my desk—the first table Eve and I bought together—careful not to bump the mouse, then I leave. Shut the door.
Because that’s where the stories, and the memories, and even the failures should stay. Locked under the cover of darkness.
I turn back to the party, the wounds fresh and pulsing in my gut, now keenly reminded of the brutal truth.
Try as I might, there are no happy endings.
Chapter 2
The worst part about the dream is the helplessness. You know what I mean, the way you watch from the outside, your feet cemented, your body encased in a sort of glue, and even the words issuing from your mouth are garbled as you scream for everything to stop. Or in the case of this particular re-occuring nightmare—to run.
Please, Oh, God, run.
Because every single time I’m standing on the corner, screaming, as a young mother, her toddler on her hip, goes into the Daily Grind coffee shop. That’s when my heart starts pounding, my breathing thickens, and the sweat coats my body because I know her. She’s Melinda Jorgenson, and in her identification photo she had blonde hair, was wearing a pair of yoga pants, a T-shirt and tennis shoes. In my dream, she’s fresh from her morning walk and meeting her mother—I don’t remember what she looks like. Most importantly, she is carrying her two-year-old son.
Blue eyes. Blond curls. He’s holding a Beanie Baby, a frog, I think.
The dream is merciful. It never recalls the after photos or Silas’s gruesome scene shots. Some things a detective, no matter how much he’s seen, just never forgets, and Melinda Jorgenson clutching her towheaded kid in death is one of them.
But in my dream, they’re always alive for at least ten agonizing seconds while I stand in the cement, screaming at the top of my lungs.
Run.
The building explodes and although I expect it, I still flinch. Dust and smoke boil out, flames sear the morning air, and only then does the scream break free.
I’ve learned to shut my horror down before it breaks the veneer of slumber, at least most of the time. But I wake to my whimpers, my heart a fist against my chest, thundering in my ears.
My body is shaking, the sweat coating my chest as I wake now. The room is pitch, just the blood red glow of the numbers on the alarm clock against the ceiling. The whir of the fan is a hum, rhythmic and safe.
I’m not standing on a street corner watching people burn alive.
I loosen my hold on my sheets, kick them off and just breathe.
Seven people died that morning. If I think hard, I can probably remember their names. Memory is cruel that way—it steals the moments you want to save, and leaves behind the rubble.
Eve stirs beside me and rolls over. “Babe, you’re sweating.” Her eyes open and she raises herself onto her elbow. “Which dream was it? The ice—?”
“The bombing.”
She makes a noise of understanding, her hand trailing up to reach my face, hold it.
“It’s okay.” I weave my fingers through hers. “Go back to sleep.”
She drifts back to her side and climbs back under a mountain of covers, dressed in long pajamas, despite the relative summer heat. She’s always cold, and when we were first married she would press her iceberg feet to my legs and chill me to the bone. She wears wool socks now—it’s simply easier, maybe than to wait for me to come to bed. I miss her toes against my skin.
Tonight, she escaped upstairs shortly after my parents left while I wrestled with the leaky faucet, avoiding the file box in my office.
The after pictures of Melinda Jorgenson and her son have found me, however, so I get up, walk to the bathroom, and shut the door. The light burns the images away and when I scrub some water on my face, it flushes away the memory enough for me to find myself.
I’m awake, edgy, and not a little peeved, so I flick off the light and creep across the room and litter of pillows on the floor. Our dog—no, Eve’s dog, a tiny salt-and-pepper rescue mutt named Oliver—lifts his head from one of the mounds, but deems me inconsequential and goes back to sleep.
Apparently, I do this too often for Oliver to get worked up.
But it’s the quiet hours that lure me to the muse, to prod at the words that seem to hide when the light of day hits. In truth, I’m a thief, searching for story as I sneak around my house in the middle of the night.
God, please I’m begging you, if you’re up there, give me words.
The moon is striping the floor outside Ashley’s room, pale fingers beckoning me to linger. So I do, then tiptoe in because my seven-year-old sleeps like me—her covers in a tangled mess. But she possesses the body temperature of her mother, so I straighten them out, pull them up and burrito her inside them. The light through her shuttered blinds turns her hair white, her cute pink mouth puckered up. She’s curled around a stand-in for Gomer, some counterfeit friend she pulled from her wealth of stuffed animals shoved into the closet and spilling out into her room.
She is spoiled, I know it and I don’t care. I’m not unaware of how lucky I am that she is alive, healthy, happy and mine. And Eve along with her.
It’s these little moments that can break me, and I blow out a breath and lean down, press a kiss to that downy cheek.
Then I creep down to my study.
It’s just how I left it, the file box on the desk, the computer icon swirling. I shut the door. Flick on my desk lamp.
Light puddles against the file box and for a long second, I debate.
But
