The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(76)

A commotion of footsteps up the stairs and Will was there then. He slid in on his knees, and Erik carefully handed Lucky off to him, scooting back and out of the way.

Will rocked her, holding her head safe on his chest. Lucky was sobbing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Will picked up her face, kissed it all over. He was crying too, whispering, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault, it’s all right.”

“I changed my mind, I wanted it.”

“I know. It’s all right. I just need you to be all right. I just need you. I just need you. It’s all right, Luck. I just need you…”

Erik helped Will put Lucky in his car to take her to the campus health center. He stood on the porch, watching the red tail lights disappear down the street and turn a corner.

They always leave in the middle of the night, he thought.

He went back inside.

Daisy was in the little front hall, wrapped in a throw blanket and shivering. Erik shut the door, then lurched into her. She opened her arms and caught him. They slid down to the floor, clutching one another.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for helping her. You were so good. You were so good to her.”

He was shaking so hard his bones hurt. The thought of the blood in the bathroom was making him feel sick. “I can’t go back up there,” he whispered, filled with shame about it, feeling cowardly and weak but he couldn’t, he could not go back in there.

“What’s the matter? Tell me.”

“The blood. I can’t, Dais, I can’t do it again.”

“I’ll take care of it. No, no, it’s all right, I understand.” Her kisses on his face, her hands soothing on his head. “I’ll clean it up. It won’t upset me.”

The wolves were on him. They had him by all four limbs, one tearing open his chest, another devouring his belly, a third at his throat. They had him. “God, Dais, what’s happening to me?”

She wrapped him in the blanket, in her arms and legs, and her hair. “It’s all right. It’s all right…”

They leave in the middle of the night. He couldn’t shake the foreboding thought, couldn’t discern who he meant by “they.” They left. It left. Everything left. Nothing would stay in place. It was a constant clutch and grab and fight like hell to hold onto anything good anymore.





Beginning Of The End


The winter was cold, bleak and relentless. The sun never seemed to break through the veil of sickly grey clouds pressed down over Lancaster. All ice and slush and mud, a dirty film on the sidewalks and windows. A dull malaise permeated the student body. The whole campus seemed to be shivering, sunken in on itself, looking for warmth within instead of reaching out to build a fire.

Since the miscarriage, Erik could not deal with blood. Of any kind. A cut or scratch made him queasy. One of the stage techs suffered a nosebleed in class and Erik almost passed out. He had never been bothered by Daisy having her period, now he couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t revulsion, it was fear.

Life had become tenuous and bloody.

He wasn’t doing well.

In the apartment on Jay Street, nobody was doing well. Lucky was withdrawn, a shadow of herself. Even her curls lost their spring—they gave up, and unwound into sad, mournful tendrils.

Will looked haunted. Nobody had ever seen him so subdued and distracted, even as he wrapped himself in work and preparation for the spring concert.

Daisy chain-smoked and lost weight, her body diminishing back to ballerina fragility. She was jittery and frenetic, prone to weeping for no reason. She lost her stillness.

Erik was smoking regularly, too. He buried himself in work, buried the struggle against constant anxiety and the never-ending visions of blood. The nightmares came regularly. He woke up Daisy. She woke him. Sex was infrequent and unremarkable.

David’s mean streak was back. He regressed into old ways, like a child acting out, looking for love by asking for it in the most unloving ways. But everyone was too consumed with their own wars to pay much attention.

They gathered together in the evenings, yet each struggled alone. The winter was hard and long. One night, as they sat around watching TV, David brazenly cut cocaine out in the open, razoring the snowy powder into neat snakes on a little mirror on the coffee table.

Had the color of cocaine been the irresistible temptation? The pristine whiteness? Its seductive purity?

Erik flinched at the harsh, sucking sound of David doing two lines.

“Anyone?” David said.

They stared. Not a glance was exchanged. Everyone was making up their own mind.

“I’m good,” Will said. A beat of silence. Then he stood up. “On second thought, f*ck everything.” He went over.

“Fuck this f*cking world,” Lucky said, and crossed.

Daisy got off Erik’s lap. “I don’t care anymore.”

Erik followed. “I could get shot tomorrow. Screw it.”

They knelt around the altar of the coffee table. Will patted David’s head, and David smiled like a well-praised puppy. He was the high priest now: King David, singer of songs, bearer of gifts and bringer of comfort.

In later years, Erik viewed that night as the beginning of the end of the world. The descent into hell.

And he never forgot David had opened the gate.