Loss, a paranormal thriller (6 page)

Leaning back against the sofa, she closed her eyes.  The spinning sped up behind her eyelids.  She could feel the swirl, every rotation of the earth, its every lurching twirl.  At any moment she could simply fly apart at the seams, pulled apart by the force of the spin.

A lucid thought forced its way into the cloud of drunken stonedness.  She was smiling.  Like a dopey fool a smile had broken across her face.  Her forehead crept with sweat.  The bottle felt too large in her hands.  And she had a stupid smile on her face. 

"I'm sorry, honey," she called out to the empty room.  "I can't do this.  Can't live here.  Not without you.  I'm sorry.  That's why I'm smiling.  Not because I'm happy.  But because I miss you."

The second bottle of wine started building on the first.  Her eyelids were heavy, hard to open.  She had enough sense to want to set the wine bottle to the coffee table.  She reached out, but the near-empty bottle was too damned heavy.  It collided with the edge of the coffee table and slipped from her grasp.  She blinked a long, slurred blink, burped wetly, then watched the remaining wine leach a red pool across the tan rug. 

She flopped to her back, the skylight above far too bright for midnight.  She blinked, waiting to blackout.  Minutes passed.  Lifetimes, too.

She heard a sigh; a whisper of wind or exhaled anguish, she couldn't tell.  When she opened her eyes, a face loomed above her, backlit by the skylight.  A gaunt, bearded face.  Hard brown eyes.  Those eyes... so harsh, full of anger.

"Paul...?

Her husband didn't respond.

She couldn't move.  It took every ounce of effort to simply keep her eyes open.

"I can't stay, honey," she said.  "Not without you."

Her eyes were too heavy; she gave up trying to keep them open.  She listened for a response.

"I miss you..." she said.

"Miss you too, Angeline..."  The words drifted over the divide between them, settling into her drifting thoughts.  She felt a warmth trace her cheek.  It could've been the briefest touch from the back of his hand, the falling of her own tears, or a vile taunt from her dreaming mind.

The warmth bloomed across her skin, becoming heated friction as skin grasped skin, as desperation and loneliness fueled even more darker emotions.  His touch became insistent, and Angie could no longer open her eyes, let alone focus them.  And she no longer cared.  She pressed herself against the heat, welcoming the contact, knowing and not caring about the madness of the moment.

Trembling fingers raked her blouse before locating the buttons and pulling them free.  Hot breath gusted on her neck as she was gently lifted from the couch, her blouse pulled from her arms and tossed aside.  As he eased her onto her back, his movements took on a bizarre tenderness, a reverence that Angie could sense even as the shadow of blacking out reached out to her.  He stripped the rest of the clothes from her body until her pale naked skin pricked with gooseflesh in the winter night's chill, until she gave in to the temptation of memory and mourning.  In her last cogent thought, Angie wrapped her arms around her dead husband's neck, and pulling his heat close to her, allowed him to take her away from the haunting emptiness of loss, even if for just one night.

Chapter 7

The three weeks after coming home from the hospital passed in a blur.  When she wasn't half-heartedly accepting visits from Paul's family, Angie divided her time between empty hours that brought about the bleakest possible thoughts, and the slightly less lonesome hours spent in a Vicodin and wine-fueled haze.  Those moments of fuzzy-headed euphoria created a buffer of denial between reality and her memories.  This buffer was getting stronger by the day, and it soon began to resemble reality itself.

As February neared its end and the time between visits from family began to lengthen, Angie decided she needed to get back to work.  If she were honest with herself (which hadn't always been the case as of late), she would have to admit that the real reason she'd decided to take a long, hot shower and ready herself for work was that the wine cabinet stood empty.

Dressed in business casual attire, with her hair styled and her lunch packed, Angie was finally beginning to believe that she would wind up at the office at Chandler's Salvage and Restoration.  She still hadn't called her sister-in-law, Stephanie, with whom she shared her cramped office.  If Angie didn't show up, if some unforeseen circumstance forced Angie back to the nest of quilts on the couch, a blubbering ball of tears, she didn't want to let anyone down.  As long as she showed up unannounced, there was no possibility of that happening. 

As she applied her makeup for the first time since the night of the accident, her hand gave off a slight tremor she couldn't quite control.  She knew what would steady her hand, or at least allow her the numbness not to notice.  At the thought, the telltale odor of a Vicodin high permeated her nostrils.  She'd become used to anticipating the slightly metallic tang in her nostrils that let her know the painkiller was working and that soon her dark thoughts would leaven.

Angie felt a surge of anger at herself over her weakness.  She capped her lipstick and tossed it into her makeup bag sitting open next to the sink.  As she dabbed a tissue at the corner of her mouth, she considered herself in the mirror.  The woman staring back at her looked familiar, almost like the déjà vu brought about by a stranger's eye contact while passing on the street.

"I know you," she said aloud.  "You used to laugh.  You used to never worry about tomorrow."

Tomorrow worried her like nothing else, tomorrow and every other day that followed.  Tomorrow would be a time of loss, another day in a growing string of days without Paul.  And as more tomorrows became yesterdays, she feared losing the memories of Paul, both the good and the bad, and having him fade from her life completely. 

She realized she'd started crying and that if she didn't get things under control, she would have to reapply her makeup.  If she had to bother, she would never leave the house today.  She dabbed her eyes, pressed her fingers to the dark bags beneath.

"You can do this, Ang.  Stop being such a baby."

After a protracted breath that hitched deep in her chest, the next came more smoothly, and with the next, she felt like she might not fall apart at the slightest provocation.

She didn't necessarily miss her job.  Before the accident, it had been a typically boring eight-hour ordeal of filing papers, keeping track of invoices and payroll, and answering phones.  Now, nearly three months since that tragic evening, she was starting to miss the daily human contact.  Even the thought of seeing her mother-in-law didn't make her cringe.

Her image in the mirror had resolved into something much more familiar.  Angie Chandler now stared back at her.  A slightly haggard, tired version of Angie Chandler, but at least it was a start.  She grabbed her purse and lunch, ready to leave.

As she rushed toward the front door, Bizzy charged after her, wagging her tail, anticipating a walk in the woods.

"No, girl.  This is for real.  I'm going to work."

With the wagging of her tail diminished to a meager twitch, the dog seemed to frown up at her, as if she really understood the implication of Angie being gone all day.

"After work, I promise, we'll get out for a nice long walk."  She said and kneeled down to scratch the little terrier behind the ears.  "I know, I've been a bad Mommy.  You've barely been out.  And I know how you love it."

Bizzy let out a single excited bark.

"Tonight.  I promise."

Bizzy wagged her tail again.  Feeling like she'd salvaged something in their relationship, Angie grabbed her things and made it out to the car before she could change her mind.

Paul's Honda Pilot had been totaled, so that left her to drive her ten year-old Accord.  The car still handled like a dream, and it was comforting easing into the worn leather seat when she climbed inside. She managed to key the ignition on the second try.  She wouldn't even acknowledge the shaking of her hand as she pulled the transmission into drive, or how her fingers blanched as she gripped the steering wheel when she left the tree-lined confines of the curving gravel drive as the tires met asphalt.

It was only several minutes later, after a minivan with its horn blaring whipped around the Accord to pass her in the oncoming lane, that Angie realized she was cruising at a steady twenty miles an hour, half the legal speed limit.

"Okay, asshole, I hear you."

She punched the accelerator and brought the Accord to a respectable thirty-five, but her chest tightened at the increased speed.  The leafless trees blurred by in a brown and steel-gray tumult, a chaotic riffle of empty gaps, denuded branches, and low-lying fog.  She focused on the road ahead while trying to control her breathing. 

She knew why her body was reacting in such a way to the simple act of driving.  This very action, carried out by her own hand, had killed Paul.  And now, acknowledging her own trepidation, even to herself, the emotions resurfaced. 

"I killed Paul.  I killed my soul mate."  Her voice sounded reedy in the enclosed passenger compartment, unhinged.

She was met by the hum of the Accord's engine and nothing more.  Her admission hung in the air.  There was no one else to blame but herself.  The Accord slowed again, and she watched the road through a blurred veil of tears.

When she turned down the road that would lead her to downtown Grand View and Chandler's Salvage and Restoration, her heart galloped in her chest, feeling like it would burst as it pummeled her sternum.

"This is it.  The street..." she whispered.  "Oh no, Ang.  You stupid idiot."

Time slid into slow motion.

The street, with its gnarled oaks and poplars crowding the lanes, Chase's Pitstop with its blaring OPEN sign stood just north of the road.

Flashes from the night of the accident burst into her vision:

Paul, drunk and nearly passed out, muttering, "Angel... love my Angel..."

The falling snow deepening across the road, the fluffy white nearly blinding in its intensity...

And the deer (
no, it had been a man, a man dressed in black
) stood in the road.

Angie had a nearly uncontrollable impulse to yank the steering wheel hard to the right in order to avoid the deer (
manmanman, stupid cunting man
) in the road.

But the road was clear.  The snow had melted after a succession of warm days.

"It was a man, not a deer," she admitted.  Speaking those words solidified her memory.  She could remember him standing in the road, moving to center himself with the Pilot's grill even after Angie attempted evasive action.

Her mouth tasted suddenly sour, and then it watered, craving the sweetness of wine.  Her chest continued to tighten, compressing her rollicking heart in its panic-stricken grip.  Her heartbeat echoed in her ears as glittering sparks shot across the darkening backdrop of her vision.

Nearly blind, she eased the car to the shoulder and put the car in park.  Angie grasped her arms across her chest and rocked herself, focusing on nothing more than that simple motion.  Nothing else mattered, nothing else existed, just the soothing movement, the slight pressure of her own arms across her chest.

Her heartbeat eased.  She opened her eyes and her vision had cleared.  When she took in her surroundings, she saw tire marks gouged into the gravel skirting the road, and the marks trailing away, leaving deep treads plowed through the winter-gray grass.  The treads cleaved a path clear to the edge of the woods.  And there, at the wall of trees, broken saplings marked the Pilot's journey into the woods; broken teeth in a wounded mouth.

Of all the places in the world for her to have a panic attack, it had to be here.  The last place in the world she ever wanted to visit again.

She tilted her head back against the head rest and closed her eyes.

The image of the man in the road resolved in fine focus behind her eyelids.  The man dressed in all black... his face a jumble of familiar curves and sharp angles, a brown beard growing wild across his chin... and the way he touched her when the fog of wine and Vicodin descended over her... the way her body responded... full of wanton lust and loneliness...

"No!" she screamed, shaking her head to clear it.  "Fucking, no!  That didn't happen.  This isn't happening."

She opened her eyes and took in her surroundings (ignoring the tunnel into the woods forged by the Pilot), seeing everything, the salt-stained asphalt, the mournful winter trees and dead grass, the occasional mailbox near the road, everything and anything, just so that whatever she saw was real and would root her to both the real world and the
now
, and push away the knowing, the full-blown understanding of what she had done, what she had allowed to enter her body...

"Paul," she sighed, her temples throbbing with a budding migraine.  "What's happening to me?"

A car rushed by, its side view mirror dangerously close to clipping her own.

"Am I going crazy?  Are you haunting me?"

The car was silent.  No answers were forthcoming.

Angie pulled herself together.  She would never make it in to work, let alone through an entire eight hour day, in her current state.  She wondered if she ever would.

When she'd pulled the Accord around, heading for home, and the broken teeth in the wounded mouth that represented the ending of her former life drifted from sight within the rearview mirror, the tightness in her chest began to ease.  As it did, she felt an almost unbearable fatigue settle over her muscles.  It felt like she had been holding her breath ever since Nathan and Macy brought her home from the hospital, and that she was finally able to exhale.  She had been holding her breath, waiting for the world to decide what to do with her.

She approached Chase's Pitstop.  She felt like pulling over and storming inside to chastise Chase for leaving that goddamn sign on every hour of the day.  Didn't he know how ignorant that made him look?