Page 39 of The Grave Between Us
The FBI had trusted him. The public had trusted him. Those men had trusted him—if not directly, they’d at least trusted in his office, in his badge and his gun and the power of the FBI to keep them safe. Noah, now, trusted him.I’ll keep you safe.
He’d let everyone down. But damn it, he wasn’t going to let Noah down.Whatever it takes, Noah. I swear.
* * *
Noah tooka week off to recuperate, and Cole followed suit. He spent his days at Noah’s side, their mornings filled with the rituals of breakfast and getting Katie to school. After, they went home and watched TV or read together, legs entwined on the couch as they cuddled close and held hands. Noah had physical therapy appointments to work on restrengthening his lung and his shoulder muscles, and Cole drove him there and back every day.
In the afternoons, they picked Katie up from school and brought her home, and then it was homework and making dinner and hanging out together as a family. They played board games in the dining room, watched TV in the living room. Katie made an effort—sometimes successful—to put her shoes away and do her homework without complaining.
Every day, Cole put his face on like a mask. Something inside of him felt like it had dropped into the center of a deep pool, plunging further and further away. He felt like a worried thread coming loose, like part of him was unraveling.
But he buried that feeling each morning as he stared into the bathroom mirror. Sometimes it felt like there was a darkness creeping in on the edges of his vision, and he looked, trying to see if it really was there or if he was falling backward again. He’d crawled out of the pit once before. He remembered what it was like, staring up at the world, the edges of reality blurry and swollen, tunneled down to almost nothing.
Not again. He gripped the edge of the sink. Forced a smile to his face as Noah came up behind him. “Morning,” he said, kissing Noah’s neck, inhaling his scent. He let his eyes close for a moment. Opened them again. Took Noah’s hand and led him to the shower.
It was easier around Noah. Easier to try to dig himself out. Easier to push away the fog that tried to encircle him, wind around and around him like a trap, like a restraint, like hands that grabbed him and wanted to hold him down. He was desperate for sunlight, the summer warmth that Noah had always been to him. Golden fields, blue skies.
He poured himself into each day with an almost fevered intensity, trying to recreate exactly what he’d done before Ian had touched Noah and cast his shadow over their happiness. Had he joked over breakfast? Kissed Katie on her hair while she drank her tea? How tightly had he held Noah’s hand? How wide was his smile, before? Fake it till you make it, or until it comes back. If he wished for all the sunlight in the world to burn away the shadows, maybe it would come true.
If nothing else, damn it, Noah was going to be happy. The darkness wouldn’t get him. Noah wasn’t going into that hole.
So Cole smiled, and he laughed, and he drove Noah to physical therapy and Katie to school, and he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and chewed the edges of his fingernails until his skin cracked and bled. Noah ran his thumbs over Cole’s fingers when they drove, and he took Cole’s hands at night on the couch. Cole bounced his knee instead, then, until Katie snapped at him that he was shaking the coffee table while she was trying to do her homework.
Noah took his hand and kissed his palm, in the same place where a paper crane made out of a dead man’s photo once rested.
When Noah went to sleep, it was like he’d taken the sun with him, and while he snored and pressed his face into Cole’s neck, the world around Cole became colder and darker. The moon was a cold coin, a spotlight that seemed to crawl across their bedroom floor as if it was searching for him. “Here he is,” he imagined the moon saying on his third night without sleep. “I’ve found him for you.”
He tried to stay with Noah. It was easier in the day, though. It was easier when he could hear Noah’s voice, see into his eyes. When Cole didn’t feel like the darkness was ready to leap out at him.
The light of his computer monitor beckoned, like the false glint of light at the bottom of a pit making him dig deeper instead of turning toward the sky. He slunk from their bed to the office every night, turning on his computer and opening up the case files again. Missing men stared back at him from the monitor.Have You Seen This Man?Scanned and tattered flyers, old family photos, photocopies askew.
James Carmichael, vanished from the Salmon Run trailhead. Darryl Winthrop, last seen walking along a rural highway. Juan Gonzaga, whose sedan was found parked behind a strip mall, his driver’s side window broken and an inch of rain in the footwell.
And on and on and on. Faces and names vanished from the earth. Whenever he closed his eyes he heard screams, saw men on their knees begging for their lives.Please, please. Saw his own fingers trailing through the dirt, brushing against something cold and firm.
He stumbled back to bed and collapsed against Noah around four every morning, only to be awakened by nightmares soon after he’d closed his eyes, dreaming for only a scant few minutes before his heart tremored with panic and ripped him out of sleep. He’d wake with a jolt, grabbing Noah. When the sky shifted, lightening in wavering lines of spilled paint, he’d sit up and watch Noah sleep, let his fingers play in Noah’s sleep-mussed hair, lean his thigh against Noah’s warm, solid back. Noah was there, with him. Alive.
Ian was out there, but Noah was here.
One hundred and twenty-seven missing men in Arizona. Four hundred and thirteen in Illinois.
Whenever Cole closed his eyes, he seemed to fall backward, tumbling forever in slow motion. It was all he could do to reach out and sink his hands into the side of the pit, try to slow how he was being pulled into the darkness. He scraped, and he fought, and he screamed, and he tried to claw his way back toward the light.
Toward Noah.
* * *
Noah watchedKatie twirl in her dress, beaming as she ran her hands over the flowery, gauzy fabric. She knocked the heels of her boots together, struck a pose. “See, Dad? It’s a good dress.”
“It is, K-Bear.” He took her hand and spun her gently, like he had when she was a Girl Scout Brownie and they’d gone to the Daddy-Daughter Sock Hop together. She’d danced on his toes all night back then. Now, she was the better dancer, and he’d need to dance on her toes to keep up. “You look beautiful.”
Cole smiled at him from Katie’s bedroom doorway. “I think we did good,” Cole said.
“Okay, Dad,” Katie said, dragging him toward her bathroom. “You have to learn about makeup and eyeshadow palettes. I’m going to teach you.”
He endured an hour of Katie’s makeup demonstration, nodding along as she laid out a dozen brushes and more makeup than he saw in the grocery store. He uh-huh’d along with the primer and foundation, watched as Katie dotted on contour like she was an extra inBraveheart. He closed his eyes when she went at herself with the eyeliner pencil, certain she was going to poke her eye out, and then gamely played along when Katie said “See? Totally different,” and pointed to her eyebrows.
“Absolutely, K-Bear.”
