The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(53)

Erik nodded, and shook the proffered hand.

His tea had gone cold. The same woman brought him another cup. Apologetically she said she had tried his mother’s number three times but no one was answering. Erik tried twice himself.

“My brother should be home,” he said. His jaw felt like it weighed ten pounds. “But he’s deaf, he wouldn’t pick up. I’d need to call on a TDD.”

“Do we have a TDD?” the woman said to one of her colleagues.

“What’s a TDD?”

“The thing for hearing impaired people. You type over the phone line—“

“Wait,” Erik said, holding his head. “She’s in Florida.”

He was an idiot. Christine was down in Key West with her boyfriend, Fred. Erik fretted another five minutes over how to reach her, before thinking to check his wallet where, sure enough, he had written Fred’s number. Of course. He always wrote down everything.

He was exhausted then. After being questioned, the additional mental effort to produce this phone number was nearly too much.

The women dialed and spoke to Fred first, paving the way. Then Erik took the phone and Christine got on. It was surreal. Through the receiver she was crying and saying things, and his mouth was moving and he was saying things. Moments went by but they didn’t pile up into memory. They fell like wheat before the plow of a recurring image—James firing and Will rearing up, throwing Daisy off his back. It cut a swathe through his mind and he looped through a dull confusion to arrive at the present again, wondering what had happened.

“I love you,” his mother said. “I love you, Erik. I’m coming there. I’ll get a flight and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“I’m all right,” he said, as more images swept through his mind like an express train, bearing down closer and closer until the train hit him with an explosion of glass fragments.

He wandered, waiting for David and Lucky to be finished with their interviews. He got hugged a lot. By dancers and stagehands. His classmates and friends. He held crying girls, thumped the backs and shoulders of shivering, red-eyed boys. From them he learned the carnage James had left in the wings before he stepped onstage. Five students dead.

“Trevor King,” they said. “He was first.”

Allison Pierce was gone. Fat okey-dokey Allison, getting on Erik’s last nerve since freshman year. Now she was dead.

“And Aisha Johnson.”

“And Manuel Sabena.”

“Taylor Revell.”

The faces raced before Erik’s eyes. Aisha, the gorgeous Grace Jones double whose dancing ruled Powaqqatsi. Gone. And Taylor, who had switched partners so Daisy could dance with Will. It might have been her on the stage and Daisy in the wings. Erik’s mind swam into an alternate scenario, automatically thought Thank God before clamping down in shame. He shook his head hard. “Who else is hurt?”

Like a jigsaw puzzle, pieces of experience were fit together. Who had been where. Who had seen what.

“Where’s Kees?” Erik asked.

“I saw him leave in an ambulance but he was sitting up. It looked like his shoulder was shot. Or his arm.”

“Marie Del’Amici is in bad shape,” someone else said. “She was shot but somehow she crawled between rows to hide. They didn’t find her right away.”

“I saw them working on her. They had a defibrillator.”

“Where’s Daisy?” they asked Erik. “What happened to Will?”

“Does anyone know?”

“What is happening?”

Erik felt a little sick. In the men’s room he ran the faucet cold and splashed his face. The water fell crimson back in the sink. He stared at it, then looked up at the mirror. He stepped back to see more of his reflection.

He was covered with blood.

He looked down. Streaked and dried in the hair on his forearms, caked in his fingernail beds, smeared across his shirt like some abstract painting. It capped the toes of his work boots and had turned the knees of his jeans to maroon leather.

Dizzy and shaking, Erik sat on the tile floor, back up against the wall beneath the paper towel dispenser. He stared at his hands. At Daisy’s blood on them.

He felt branded. Eeerily and irrevocably owned. She had marked him. He had marked her in blood once—the night of her eighteenth birthday, the night she gifted herself to him. She had bled and he had used it as ink, writing his name on her leg. Now he was claimed. He had gone through gunfire and terror to pass the last test, the final ordeal, and his reward was now in his hands. On his hands.

It’s all there is, he thought, turning his palms up and then down, taking it in. No one but her. After today I can love no one but her.

“You live a f*cking fairytale with Daisy,” James had said angrily. Erik would never know if James had come into the theater targeting Will, and if everyone else was collateral damage. Maybe Daisy had been a target. Perhaps Erik too. Or their fairytale. The vendetta could have been generalized or specific. But if James had come into the theater with any intent of destroying Erik and Daisy, he had failed. The fairytale was over, yes, but a truer, grittier human tale had begun in its place. A book with the strength of blood in its bound pages.

Erik began to cry. He didn’t know if it was from fear or joy, but unable to stop it, he wrapped his arms around his legs, put his mouth on his knees and caved into it. He listened to the sound of his chest-wrenching sobs echoing off tile. He was both frightened and fearless. His own splendid anguish ricocheting around him. This was the real story. This was how it started. Not with locked eyes during romance and sex, but with blood. With locked eyes in a crisis. With I am here. Helping even though it hurt. Making your fingers let go even as your heart was breaking. To do what you had to do to survive so the story could go on being told.