Page 29 of I Dream of Danger
Elle wrapped her arms around her midriff, trying to contain the pain inside waiting to spill out. It felt exactly as if someone had punched a huge hole in her, ripping out her heart. She rocked, trying to dissipate the pain.
Of course Nick had paid. He’d come back, briefly. Found her looking like an abandoned stray, bereft of everything, thrown her a mercy fuck, got some groceries in the house, and settled her bill.
Then left, of course. Why would he stay?
At some point Mr. Bent must have hung up because the handset on the floor stopped squawking. At some point, the sun moved across the sky. At some point, she stopped shaking.
At some point she recognized deep, deep in her bones, not just in her head, that Nick was never coming back.
As the light was fading from the sky, it started snowing, and the temperature in the house dropped, became colder yet. When her fingers and toes started hurting, she got up stiffly, muscles and bones aching.
She moved slowly, as if someone had beat her and she was nursing injuries. Someone had beat her, of course. Nick. It would have hurt much less if he’d actually taken a baseball bat to her because broken bones knit, eventually. Broken hearts? Not so much.
An animal instinct told her she’d been grievously wounded. Something deep inside her had been broken. She shuffled slowly through the house, touching things Nick had touched.
There was no energy in her to put the massive quantities of food away. Just seeing all that food made her nauseous. She could barely bring herself to look at it. She shuffled out of the kitchen closing the door behind her.
One by one, she closed every door of the house. All the downstairs rooms, pulling the doors gently closed, hardly realizing what she was doing, knowing only that the house should feel the way she did. Empty and closed.
Somehow it had become dark. She didn’t have the energy to turn on the lights. The darkness somehow fit.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, looking up. The stairs seemed interminable, like they went all the way up to heaven, though of course there was no heaven. Just the second floor, and her bedroom. The stairs seemed impossible to climb, though she managed it slowly, step by step. She’d been doing the impossible for some years now and she could do this, even though each step felt like climbing a mountain. Her legs were weak and could barely carry her. Halfway up, she had to sit on a step and rest her swimming head on her knees. After a while, she got up again, clutched the banister, and pulled herself up, step by step. Feeling a hundred years old, she finally made it to the top and shuffled down the corridor.
Elle stopped at the threshold of her dark bedroom, closing her eyes and swallowing heavily.
The room smelled of him. Smelled of primal male, of male sweat and sex and some special pheromonal scent of Nick she would recognize anywhere because it had been imprinted on her skin and in her mind.
Oh God, she had to be quick before she broke down and cried. If she fell onto her bed crying, she would never get up. She felt that, felt deep in her soul that if she gave in to despair she would never recover. There was absolutely nothing left in her to resist the darkness. She’d fall into it and never come out.
During the long years of caring for her father there’d been a wall inside her. Outside she did all the things she should—cared for and loved a husk of a man who didn’t recognize her. Who had forgotten how to feed himself and wash himself. Who required the care a baby would, except this was a 190-pound man. Then a 160-pound man. Then a 120-pound man.
She cared for him, dealt with doctors and medical bills and running a household. But there was always the wall she could retreat behind, and behind that wall she was still Elle Thomason, a young girl, and then a young woman with a young woman’s dreams. Behind that wall, if she could get her father to sleep fitfully, she could read books and laugh at TV shows and get indignant at the news she read off the net.
There was a duty-bound robot in front of the wall, but behind that wall was a person—Elle Thomason.
That wall was shattered and there was no place to hide now. Nothing between her and cold reality.
Elle needed to get away from here. She needed it like she needed air. If she continued staying in this cold, dark, and empty house with her father’s ghost and the memory of those few hours with Nick, hours in which she’d felt warm and sexy and alive, in which she’d been a woman and not a pathetic discard, she would die. She’d simply curl up into a ball trying to protect her shattered heart and never get up again.
Her will to live was almost gone and she had to leave this place before it sucked the marrow of her bones.
There was no plan. She was operating entirely on instinct. Some sluggish yet stubborn part of her that insisted on movement, on escape.
Packing—that wasn’t hard. Her wardrobe had been whittled down to basics. And she didn’t want to carry much, anyway. The down coat with the ripped sleeve she should have worn to the burial, two sweaters, three pairs of jeans, warm pajamas, socks, underwear, boots. Everything fit into a large backpack.
She looked around her room carefully. The bed was rumpled, unmade. It was almost like a religious ritual with her to make up the bed as soon as she got up, but there it was—blankets and sheets tossed every which way. She could see semen stains, and a darker splotch that was her blood. For a second the desire to walk over and bury herself in the bedclothes, curl up on the bed and breathe in the smell of Nick was nearly overwhelming.
That way lay madness, though. She’d lived far too long with madness, knew exactly where that led. It led to death.
There was no life in here. Just sadness and despair. She closed the door quietly and walked back downstairs.
What else would she need? Documents. She hesitated in front of the study door, then pushed it open. It had been her father’s refuge. Later, it became a place of torment as she tried to jam the square peg of their penury into the round hole of her father’s endless needs. She swallowed and walked inside.
During her childhood she’d loved coming here. The room always smelled of books and lemon polish and the flowers Mrs. Gooding cut from the garden. Now it smelled of mildew and dust.
She checked for the thousandth time their bank account. There was only a couple hundred dollars in the account, free and clear now that the funeral was paid for. And there was the mortgage. Three years ago she’d had to get a mortgage on the house as her father’s medical needs ballooned. The bank director—whose son Daddy had helped keep out of trouble with some minor drug dealing charges—had been very difficult to deal with. She’d gotten the mortgage at ruinous terms, and was deep underwater. The mortgage was worth much more than the house.
The house was falling down and needed new plumbing, a new roof, and a new boiler. A new everything, really.
