The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(82)

His necklace was gone.

He dropped the brush, minty foam dripping from his mouth. His hands felt his neck and chest in wild desperation.

Gone.

How could it be gone?

He looked in his bed, yanked sheets and blankets and shook them out, waiting to hear the clink of gold links on the floor.

Nothing.

He went through his backpack, his pockets. He combed the floor. He went all over the house. Through all the boxes and bags of possessions he had brought from Lancaster.

It was gone.

Was it on him when he left school? Of course it was.

I think it was.

Of course it was. It was always on him. He must have lost it on the way home. At a gas station. Or a rest stop.

Devastated and crushed with guilt, he sank onto his bed, weeping for all that had been lost. Lena put her nose in his neck and whined high in her throat. Erik hooked an arm around her, pulled her close, felt her solid weight and warm panting. She rested her muzzle on his shoulder, licked his ear, whined again and laid her silken face against Erik’s wet one.

I am here now. And I understand.

She was here now. But she’d die someday and be gone. Like everything else. Everything was temporary. It all left in the end. Sooner or later it pulled down the driveway in the middle of the night. Or it was shot down or sliced open. It dissolved into bloody drips in the toilet or it ended up in bed with another man. Nothing good would stick around.

Pain, however, was in it for the long haul.

Pain stayed.

Erik let go of Lena, turned from her comfort and buried his head beneath the covers.

This was his life.





Part Four: Diane





A Jilted Woman


Time was a formidable enemy.

Time was an infinite road into a barren wasteland. A rocky, potholed path comprised of increments Erik could not fathom: weeks, months, years—they only meant pain and loss to him. Together they made up a more ominous concept called a lifetime. His life was unfolding before him without Daisy.

Those first few weeks of late spring after he arrived home were lost to him. Nothing imprinted. His short-term memory was short-circuited. Later, he would look back on those months as if through the wrong end of a telescope, wondering how he had done it, just how he had survived. He had no active recollection of doing so.

Time frightened him. It made him physically ill. If he thought in any length of time longer than a day, he could not get out of bed in the morning. When he was in a good place, he could manage a twenty-four hour cycle. During the slumps, he had to hold his own hand through minutes.

And yet, time could be an insanely elastic and devious thing. First it stretched before him like a snake, hissing words like forever, never, always and infinite. Then one day Erik woke up and nine months had passed. He should have felt triumphant, instead he felt bewildered. Where had it all gone?

If he wasn’t grappling with time, he was dodging never-ending attacks of memory. The world was a war zone: recollections booby-trapped every corner. Free associations waited on rooftops to take pot shots at him. Everything reminded him of Daisy. Everything. For those first nine months, he didn’t go to movies, rarely read a book and avoided music as much as possible—music was the worst. He kept the radio in his car tuned to sports networks or NPR, and if ever he were subjected to songs, he imagined a filter in his head rendering the lyrics meaningless.

Given his way, he would destroy every known copy of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”

Where once he’d been surprised to discover the depths of his passion, he was now equally astonished at how well he could shut down. You will feel nothing was his mantra whenever memory staged a sneak attack. It was another time, another life, and it’s over now. They are gone, you are here, and you will feel nothing.

His most secret weapon was staging a re-enactment of the shooting in the theater. Only this time, everyone was gunned down and killed.

She died. Everything that happened after was a dream. She’s gone. She was gone a year ago. Will’s gone. Lucky, David, Neil and Opie—everyone who was in the theater is gone. They’re just outlines of graffiti backstage. You’ve been asleep. It was a dream.

It’s time to wake up now.



*



Daisy phoned regularly those nine months. Christine soon wearied of fielding the awkward calls, and Erik had his own phone line installed. He rarely answered it, screening every call by letting it go to the machine and picking up when it was warranted. He never picked up for Daisy and didn’t return any of her calls. He wouldn’t speak to her. Could not speak to her. A few times she managed to catch him live on the phone, and each time he froze into silence.

“Talk to me,” she would whisper. It was a stranger’s voice, a pathetic keen of agonized chagrin. “Erik, please talk to me. I’m so sorry.”

In his mind she was still on her knees in the kitchen at Jay Street. Kneeling in the bombed-out crater of their love, beseeching him. He gazed over the top of her bowed head and said nothing. Like an Easter Island statue he stared out to sea, stony and resolute, refusing to engage or acknowledge, until she hung up in tears. Then he would crumple on the floor, undone, and he’d have to start all over again, scrabbling to collect the bits and pieces of his life and glue them together.

She continued to call. He kept throwing fire at the bridge, and she kept putting the flames out and shoring up the timbers. He laid land mines, and she picked her way through them.