Sunday, January 1 #3
But here we go again. He must stop showing up unannounced.
This time, however, he managed to pull himself together.
Even with his salt-and-pepper hair, right down to the handcrafted gray suit and white dress shirt with his monogram on the left cuff, he revived his runway look.
He had a knack for looming over her. This was getting old.
She wouldn’t live long enough to grow old if she kept stepping in front of moving vehicles.
“Darling,” Nicholas said softly, sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her hand. “You frightened me.”
She frightened him? Foggy head or not, she didn’t believe it possible.
Angelica scanned the room. This wasn’t the hospital; she was in his king-sized bed!
She doesn’t belong here. Flashback! She had shared this bed not long ago.
She glanced around the room, her eyes falling on the opposite wall and the open safe. Instant recall! She clenched her teeth.
“I’m going to call your neurologist tomorrow, Angel, and schedule an appointment as soon as I can. Something’s wrong. All these headaches, then passing—”
“No! I’m not going to the doctor. I want ... I want to go home. Someone ... someone, please take me home.”
“This is your home, sweetheart.”
Angelica’s hand flew to her mouth, and her sorrowful eyes brimmed with fresh tears. “Why are you doing this to me, Nicholas? You must truly hate me. Stop!” she cried.
“Dear God, I didn’t do this to you,” Nicholas insisted, rising and walking across the room. He paced, his weighty strides in sync with his fitful, exhaled breaths. After his wandering, he turned to face Angelica, propped up on a mountain of pillows.
“I prayed to God every day to bring you back to me. When He did, you didn’t remember.
You didn’t remember anything. I’ve been afraid to tell you for the last five long, damn years.
Afraid you’d remember the day … the painful day our precious one-year-old daughter was taken from us.
It’s been killing me all these years. Not only did I lose my child, but I also lost my wife.
“Would you have been happier if you had known Sofia had passed away?” he said, his voice heavy with grief.
Angelica’s guttural wail rose to an agonizing scream, surely heard fifteen stories below, and all the way to the last boat slip on the swaying Shadowcrest River dock.
* * *
Nicholas held his wife in his arms as he took her back to Arbortown in the limousine. A different, unfamiliar woman was returning to the cabin in the woods.
Angelica was unmarried when she attended the baby shower.
The next day, she’d been married for eleven years and was mourning her toddler.
Before leaving the condominium, Nicholas stunned her further by showing her a photo of their daughter, a face her memory had erased.
Afterward, he slipped the diamond engagement and wedding rings onto her fingers.
She was plunged into a dark, hollow part of her mind, a place she couldn’t recall, claim, or even wish to remember.
They spoke little and discussed even less during the long, exhausting trip north.
The limo’s wheels spun and thumped on the interstate, the only sounds in the vehicle.
But a hurricane churned in her head, plunging Angelica into a primal character assassination of the one left behind, not the one pulled from her heart and the hearse.
Did she give her all? Did she fall short?
Could she have been a better wife and mother?
Did she do enough? Should she have done more?
Did she excel at childcare, or stink at it?
This was like showing up for a movie just as the credits rolled.
What did she miss? In this case, there’d never be a rerun.
This performance had a limited engagement—once.
She felt trapped. The life she knew had been stolen and held hostage, with no hope of rescue. Someone was closing in on her, though. Dressed in black, donning a hood, and wielding a sickle—the Grim Reaper. She’d be buried alive when he caught her.
By the time her so-called hearse arrived at her home four ghastly hours later, Angelica’s insides were ensnared in a web. It had been a ride from hell to another hell.
Nicholas carried her through the doorway, not like a groom carrying his bride over the threshold, but like a man transferring a patient to life support.
He laid his wife on her bed. He desperately longed to stay, but Angelica shoved him away.
Shoved her husband, a strange word for someone who swore she was single, away.
She wanted Nicholas to return to “his” home because she couldn’t remember it was “hers.”
Standing in her bedroom, Nicholas repeated his familiar words to Angelica, like a needle stuck in a scratch on a 33-rpm vinyl record: “Darling, I love you and always will.”
He turned and slipped out of the room.
Angelica needed solitude to think. But the profound wish that she had also died with her daughter, the child she killed when she stepped in front of the truck on that tragic day five years ago, overshadowed everything.
* * *
Angelica lay in bed, staring into the darkness after watching the beads of light in her bedroom evaporate. She didn’t know when she had gotten home or when Nicky had left. All she was aware of was the deafening thunderclap reverberating through her head, crushing her.
She tried to remember what had happened today. Was it today? It wouldn’t fade away, no matter when it happened. Why can’t it go away? Why can’t it return to the blank hole it once occupied? It belonged there; it didn’t belong here.
She should’ve been crying, but numbness had claimed her, squeezing her dry like a sponge.
Angelica slowly stood, and as her toes touched the plush rug, Daisy scurried past her, leaped onto the bunched-up bedding, and curled into a ball.
She didn’t notice her furry friend. She fumbled with the clasp of the Tiffany necklace, took it off along with the two rings, and tossed them haphazardly into the nightstand drawer.
Angelica stumbled down the hall, to a single creak of the hardwood, toward the unlit living room. She collided with the desk and knocked over the lamp. She straightened the lamp and flipped the switch, but it cast only a dim glow. She was still emotionally in the pitch-black.
Then it hit her—a sudden, fierce notion. The chaos inside her would disappear if she went outside into the crisp air. This wasn’t real; it was just another terrifying, nightmarish episode. She raced to the front door, flung it open, and darted barefoot into the winter night.
Under the rolling clouds of an overcast sky, Angelica scampered down the front steps. Moving between a limp and a sprint, she crossed the gravel driveway and the damp grass. She was running again, her right leg slowing her, the house light behind her.
Running …
Although she was running without a destination, she was running with a purpose. She wasn’t trying to escape the ominous phantom figure from her dream; she was trying to break free from the steel bars that imprisoned her mind and kept her sanity in solitary confinement.
Running ...
Just running, as the wind sloppily combed her hair, her arms pumped and pumped, and puffs of her ragged, hot breath gave birth to short-lived vapor clouds.
Keep running! She must get away! Outrun this! Run faster and faster! Don’t stop!
Yet her escape was foiled, not by her hobble.
She had to stop when the grass beneath her toes vanished, leaving her facing an obstacle she could neither vault over nor scale—a dense wall of sky-high pines and spruce.
The forest she loved—her refuge—turned against her, blocking her escape and becoming her enemy.
Angelica clutched her head, spun around, and cried out.
She was captive outside, inside, and in her soul.
She had nowhere to go or hide. She was entombed everywhere.
Defeated and wrapped in a frigid blanket of darkness, a tear traced a zigzag line down her frosted cheek.
The only light Angelica would ever see—and ever have—pierced the night and spilled from her cabin’s front door.
Cold and alone, she stepped and stepped, then staggered.
Each footfall, whether muffled by the blustery night wind or the crunch of rocks biting into her bare feet, felt like a thousand as her legs grew more tired, more weary, and more frail.
Angelica struggled to keep going. She was getting closer … but not quite close enough.
Her trembling hands reached out, trying to grasp the beams of light as an anchor or a lifeline, but they taunted her, slipping through her fingers like mist. With one too many steps ahead of her, her feet faltered; Angelica wobbled and collapsed as snow burst through the storm clouds.
* * *
The deceased was indeed Matthew Jenkins, and the vehicle containing his body belonged to the saintly pastor.
The pastor put the nails in his own coffin when his bloodied wallet was found under the victim.
Duh! Don’t leave your calling card at the crime scene.
If he wanted a career in crime, he should have done his due diligence by watching crime shows.
Given the obvious, Bickney devised a plan to arrest Pastor Jerome Giller. Nothing rudimentary. It wasn’t.
Working with Charlie Bickney was always a hoot.
Not. The older homicide detective sought to achieve a theatrical effect, more akin to Columbo than to Law & Order.
Ed Talbert couldn’t make it. Better luck next time.
His daughter and son-in-law were visiting, and “happy wife, happy life” kept the other detective homebound.
The law enforcement team—him, Bickney, and two police officers—stood against the back wall of Heaven and Beyond Church, arms crossed, waiting for the dear pastor to begin either his uplifting sermon or the one on sin and damnation. The latter is a topic the pastor should take to heart.