Sleep Stalker (Ghosts Beyond the Grove Book 1) (12 page)

22.  Losing Ground

     Zach had barely closed the door to the bedroom when I burst into tears.  I was exhausted emotionally and physically but the last thing I wanted to do was lie down next to the stranger he’d become.  Our phone conversations over the past few weeks had given me every hope that the old Zach was back.  That our relationship was back on solid ground.  But he clearly wasn’t and neither were we. And without him, I didn’t really feel like Ruby anymore.

     After those in depth phone conversations, I was so excited for his return and he seemed to be as well.  Since he kept going on about wanting me to wear a dress, I searched the mall for hours until I found one that I thought he would like.  It was bright pink—a color he used to think looked good on me.  But the second he walked in the door, I could see the look of disappointment on his face.  What dress did he keep referring to?  Clearly, it wasn’t one that I actually owned.  The only conclusion I could come to was that he’d seen it on someone else, somewhere else.  Someone who now held the place in his heart that I used to hold.

     I tried to push that thought out of my mind when he leaned in to kiss me.  I was almost to the point of forgetting when he pushed me away.  His excuse for not wanting to kiss me was a lie and we both knew it.  Being around him for the rest of the night was excruciating for me, endless hours of walking across emotional hot coals. 

     Once I’d cried enough to get the first wave of sorrow out of my system, I sat down with my laptop and pulled up Roxanne’s email.  Nothing could truly take my mind off of what was happening between me and Zach, but thinking about my mom instead was at least a slight comfort to me.

     Forgoing my usual obsessive-compulsive ways, I typed out a few lines and clicked send before I had time to overthink it.  Instead of asking specific questions, I asked Roxanne to tell me the things she remembered most about my mother and the time they spent dancing together.  Also, I inquired whether or not she knew of anyone else who might be able to provide information for me.

     Once that email was cast off into the vast expanse of cyberspace, I sat there and stared at the wall, lost in thought.  At some point, I would have to have the awkward conversation with Zach.  I would have to confront him about the other woman, whoever she was.  Once again, I was wishing that my nemesis was dead instead of alive.  Ghosts, I could handle.  Having Zach stolen away from me by another girl, not so much.

     Lonely.  I felt very much alone.  Sure, there were a few people I could have called just for some idle chit chat;
but I didn’t feel very social at the moment.  Zach was the one I really
wanted
to talk to—but I couldn’t.  Even if he’d been awake, I was far from ready to approach the subject.  I didn’t exactly need it, but I took one of the melatonin tablets anyway and crept quietly into the bedroom.  The futon was unbearably uncomfortable and I’d gotten so used to sleeping in that bed that I sucked it up and crawled in beside him.  Tonight was one of those nights that needed to turn into morning as painlessly as possible.

     Zach lay there motionless except for the heavy rise and fall of his chest.  His breath came in short, shallow bursts as though he were exerting himself physically in his dreams.  Great.  Just great.  Here I was lying next to him while he slobbered all over some other girl in his sleep.  She was probably the exact opposite of me—some bitchy, blonde bimbo.  While I could have lain there obsessing over it until the first light of dawn, the melatonin and my exhaustion mercifully combined to send me right to sleep.

     I was in the middle of my dream about Tucson again when I was abruptly and violently awakened.  Zach was clutching my forearm with such force that my fingers were turning cold and numb. 

     “Let’s go swimming!  You look beautiful in the moonlight!” he screamed directly into my ear. 

     It was at that moment that I knew for certain that another girl wasn’t to blame for his erratic behavior.  And neither was the mono.  He was going slowly insane.  And maybe not even slowly.  He may not have incurred brain damage the day he got shot, but something was psychologically—dare I even say
psychotically
—wrong with him. 

     I wrenched my arm away from him and jumped out of the bed.  He was starting to frighten me.  He continued to beg me to go swimming with him until I left the bedroom, slamming the door behind me.  I was still leaning on the door when a loud crash resounded from the other side of it.  Scratch that.  He wasn’t
starting
to frighten me—I was downright fearful of what he was going to do next.

     Only one day back in Ohio and all the progress we’d seemingly made over the past month had flown out the window.  I couldn’t live like this for much longer.  Something had to give.

     When morning came, I was never so happy to head to work.  I was hoping that Zach wouldn’t wake up before I left.  And I almost got my wish.  As I was wrapping up breakfast and rinsing my dishes in the sink, he emerged from the bedroom groggy and disoriented.  He set one foot into the kitchen and I noticed a line of blood trailing behind him.

     “Zach!  You’re bleeding!” I shouted as I raced for the roll of paper towels on the far side of the counter.  “What happened?”

     “Bleeding?  What?” he mumbled sleepily as he sat down at the table.  “I’m not bleeding.”

     As I went to press a handful of towels against his left foot, I noticed a large shard of bloody glass jutting out from his heel.  Gingerly, I plucked it from his skin and tossed it into the garbage can.  Even though it was heavily stained, I knew what that glass used to be a part of.  My favorite mug.  Shelly bought it for me over the summer when we were picking out décor for the apartment.  It was my writer’s mug.  Emblazoned with the phrase “Be careful or I will kill you off in my next novel”, I knew
exactly
who that applied to at the present moment.  The smashing noise I heard last night was Zach lobbing my mug at the bedroom door.

     Even as I sat there contemplating killing him myself, blood continued to ooze from a deep wound that he didn’t seem to realize he had.  “Zach,” I said hesitantly, not sure of what else to say to him. 

     “Huh?” he said as he finally looked down at his heavily bleeding foot.  “Where did all that blood come from?”

     I was right.  He apparently couldn’t feel the pain that had to have been fairly intense given the depth of the cut and the extensive bleeding.  Something was dreadfully wrong with him.  “I don’t know,” I whispered.  “Just hold this here until the blood stops.  I need to go wash my hands before work.”

     My trip to the bathroom had nothing to do with cleanliness.  If that was all I was intending to do, I would have lathered up in the kitchen sink two feet away from where he sat.  I went into the bathroom so that I could have a sixty second meltdown in private before leaving for Poe’s Corner.  Dad’s tests may not have shown anything wrong with Zach psychologically the first time around, but he
needed
to do them again.  Erratic behavior was one thing, inability to feel pain opened up an entirely new set of worries for me. 

     Once I felt pulled together enough to leave, I opened the bathroom door.  I would check on him one last time to make sure the bleeding was under control then I was getting out of that apartment in an attempt to save what was left of my own sanity—which wasn’t much by now.  Instead of sitting at the table nursing his wound, I found him in the bedroom picking up the remaining pieces of my mug. 

     “You need to be more careful, Ruby.  Breaking your mug is one thing but the least you could have done is pick up the glass.  Someone could have really gotten hurt if they stepped on this.”

      I pressed my lips together firmly to help me keep from saying something I might regret.  Not only did he not remember throwing the mug at the door last night, but in five minutes’ time, he seemed to have forgotten that he did indeed get hurt.  Nodding my head in agreement, I snatched my bag and ran for the front door.

     I stayed quiet throughout the day, trying hard not to think about what might be going on in the apartment in my absence.
 
Addie’s shift and mine only overlapped by an hour so I figured that I would be able to pretend that nothing was wrong for at least that long.  But she was more perceptive than I gave her credit for and within five minutes of working together, she was asking me if I was okay.   Still reeling from Zach’s recent behavior, I decided to confide in her.  Maybe advice from someone who had never even met Zach would be helpful to me.

     “No, I’m about as far from okay as a girl can get.”

     “Wait—don’t tell me, let me take a guess first.”  Addie studied my face for a few seconds then announced her diagnosis of what was ailing me.  “Boy troubles.”

     “Is it that obvious?” I said, checking my reflection in the cappuccino machine to see what she saw in me.

     “Yes, pretty much.  It’s like a look of exasperation mixed with pure heartache—relationships are the only thing responsible for that kind of emotional cocktail.  That and the fact that I couldn’t help but notice that ya rarely seem to talk about your boyfriend at all.”

     Now that she mentioned it, I realized that she was right.  I used to talk about Zach to anyone who was willing to listen.  But from the second we moved to Ohio, he’d somehow become a secret I was desperate to keep hidden—telling only the details I deemed necessary at the moment.  But that tactic wasn’t helping me any.  It was time to open the closet door and air out the skeletons that were multiplying at an alarming rate.

     In between customers, I told her what had happened since Zach’s return from Charlotte’s Grove.  I re-hashed all of the theories of what could possibly be wrong with him.  All except for one of them.  Zach had asked me to keep his ability to see ghosts a secret so I did.  It was a useless fact anyway given what Rita had to say on the subject so there was no good reason for me to betray his trust.

     “It’s all so confusin’, Ruby.  If he seemed fine for that month that he was back home, what would make him flip out as soon as he returned?  That’s what we need to figure out.  That’s where the answer to everything lies.”

     “True, but I’ve asked him what’s wrong and he won’t even acknowledge that something
is
wrong.  I mean, swimming of all things.  I’ve almost drowned—twice.  He knows how afraid I am of the water.  Honestly, I really do think that he’s just losing his mind.” 

     Hearing that verbal confession coming from my own mouth saddened me.  My boyfriend was nuts.  My Norse god was wacko.  The love of my life was
looney tunes.  I sighed heavily and threw my bar mop down onto the counter in disgust.  He needed medication which, in turn, caused
me
to need medication, too.

     “No, I don’t think so.  But I have a brilliant idea if you’ll go along with it,” she said with a confident smile.

     “After what happened this morning, I’m willing to try anything.  So what’s your plan?”

     Addie dug into her purse and produced the small bag where she kept her tea.  “Here,” she said thrusting it toward me, “Take these home and have him pick one.  Pay attention to which pot he chooses.  Do whatever you have to do to get him to submit to a tea leaf reading.  Lie if you have to.  Then slip his cup into a plastic baggy and zip it shut so the leaves stay moist.  Bring it in tomorrow and I’ll tell you what I see.”

     It’s a good thing I was practiced in the fine art of embracing all things weird because her plan was outrageous.  Yet brilliant.  Even though I still didn’t know why a foot and a feather kept popping up in my readings, I knew there was some sort of divine pattern to it all.  And it was a pattern that I felt sure we would decipher eventually.  I nodded and shoved the tea into my bag before clocking out to go home.

     Anxious about what I was going to find when I got back to Liberty Towers, I popped into the bakery across the street for some comfort food that might come in handy later.  I browsed the selection for a few minutes before choosing a big, fat cinnamon roll for myself and a dozen chocolate chip cookies for Zach.  They were his favorite and I wasn’t above bribing him to get him to do what I wanted.  Or if all else failed, they were my second favorite baked goody and I was fully prepared to binge eat my sorrows away if things went horribly awry again.

     As I walked down the hallway toward our apartment door, I practiced looking and acting normal—like nothing was wrong.  That, I had come to find, was becoming more and more of a challenge which each passing day.  Taking one extremely deep breath, I turned the knob but found it locked.  I was so used to us only having one vehicle that I automatically drove the SUV to work this morning and never took notice of where he parked my car last night.  Which would be worse—finding him home but freaking out in some way or finding an empty apartment and worrying that he was freaking out somewhere else?

     Coco and Foxy calmly met me at the door.  The apartment was quiet and there were no signs that anything abnormal had taken place there since I last left it.  Zach was gone.  He hadn’t texted me all day nor me him.  I searched everywhere for a note but came up empty handed.  Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have been anywhere near panic mode.  But let’s face it, nothing about our current circumstances was normal.  He was in a town that he barely knew his way around and he was somewhat of a loose cannon of crazy these days.