Bound for Nirvana

by Kendra Leigh

  I knew what Ernest Schrader was wearing on his feet that day because it took a while for me to gather the courage to drag my gaze away from his shoes and slowly up a pair of loose fitting pants and sweater, which practically smothered the stick-thin body before me. I gaped at him in bewilderment. This tall, skinny old man with papery skin and watery eyes was nothing like what I’d expected. I remember wondering why he was so old, the man in my imagination was in his fifties, but Ernest Schrader must have been late seventies, at least.

  The expression on his face was one I recognized. I’d seen it recently, when Ethan’s parents had laid eyes on me for the very first time.

  Ethan cleared his throat. “Mr. Schrader, we’re sorry to bother you. My name’s Ethan Wilde. This is my fiancée, A—”

  “I know who she is. I’ve been expecting her for nearly a quarter of a century.” He paused, glancing once at Ethan before adding, “You’d better come in.”

  The room encompassed too much furniture, a smell of beeswax and stale food lying heavy in the air. A dark mahogany fireplace stood stark and foreboding, thick with the remnants of powdery, charred wood. On top lay an array of juxtaposed ceramics and tankards, disregarded and layered with dust. On a small table in the corner was a half-eaten bowl of soup.

  “Can I get you a drink? Tea? I don’t have coffee, don’t get many visitors.” His voice was croaky, but surprisingly firm, considering his slight stature, and I suspected he’d once been rather a stalwart man. I shook my head.

  “Do you have water?” Ethan asked.

  Ernest Schrader blinked his watery eyes. “Course I got water. Got a tap, don’t I?” He shuffled off into what I supposed was the kitchen, calling out as he went. “Take a seat.”

  The sofa was brown velvet, shiny in patches where the fabric had worn thin over the years. We sat down, both of us perching uneasily at the edge of the seat as Mr. Schrader returned with a glass of water and handed it to Ethan.

  “You look a lot like her.” He sat down in the armchair opposite. “The woman… your mom. I’ve thought about her a lot over the years—every day. The image of her face has never left me.”

  There was a long pause, both men waiting patiently for me to respond, but all I could do was stare at the old man.

  Ethan cleared his throat again. “Mr. Schrader, the reason we’re here—”

  “I thought about tracking you down many times.” He cut Ethan off again, his focus concentrated solely on me. “To explain. Bite the bullet before it comes to shoot me in the ass, so to speak. I didn’t know what the best thing was. I knew you’d be here to find out why one day. The guilt over your mom was harsh enough to bear, but the lying… That’s been eating me up ever since—both of us. Well, until—”

  The expression on Ethan’s face reflected mine, confusion blended with horror. He held up the flat of his hand. “Wait. What lies? What are you talking about, Mr. Schrader?”

  The deep wrinkles in the old man’s face seemed to smooth out somewhat, his expression changing to one of surprise. He turned swiftly to Ethan. “Why are you here?”

  Ethan rubbed his fingers over his chin thoughtfully, his jaw bunching as the cogs of his mind worked frantically. “Mr. Schrader, would you mind telling us exactly what happened on the day Mrs. Lawson died. There are some… discrepancies with the police report and what my fiancée remembers. We were hoping you could fill in the blanks.”

  Mr. Schrader looked worried for a second, cautious. Then suddenly his features softened, as if he’d resigned himself to some inevitable, long awaited fate. His watery gaze moved from Ethan and back to me. “What exactly do you remember?”

  “Why don’t you just start at the beginning,” Ethan said, his voice gentle, coaxing.

  The silence in the room was deafening; the only sound cutting through the stillness was that of my heart pounding frantically as I waited to hear Ernest Schrader’s story. This was the moment which could elicit the forgotten horrors of that fateful day. Memories that had lain dormant in my unconscious mind, but which had plagued my conscious mind with blurred snippets for almost my entire life. Part of me still wasn’t certain I wanted to hear it. But that was the part that sat frozen to the spot, unable to move or speak on the brown velvet sofa, inside Ernest Schrader’s shabby house.

  The old man rummaged inside his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief to dab at his pale, runny eyes. “Betty wanted to go into New York City to celebrate her birthday; meet with friends—drink. Always drink.” He saw the question in both our eyes and answered without prompting. “Betty’s my wife… was my wife. She was a drunk.” He looked down at his hands as if it was a confession of some sort. “We had a fight. About the drink. She wanted to stay in the city for the night, party until the early hours, but she’d been throwing them back all afternoon and I said she’d had enough, wanted to take her home. I was trying to get her into the truck when she grabbed the keys and started the engine. I didn’t want her to get pulled over by the police or have an accident…” His words trailed off slightly as he realized what he’d said. “… So I just jumped in next to her. She was doing okay. I was managing to get her to keep the speed down, was talking her into pulling over so I could take the wheel. I saw the man first—”

  Ethan glanced at me, the same look of bewilderment on his face as I was sure was on mine. What man? For a moment, I wondered about the state of Ernest Schrader’s mind and what the hell he was talking about.

  “I was yelling at her to slow down. There was something about the way the guy was tugging at the kid, like he was trying to pull her away from her mom, that didn’t seem right.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously, as if only just really connecting with the realization that the child in his memory was me.

  Raising a hand, I rubbed at my chest; the rate my heart pounded was becoming almost painful. I nodded once, urging him to continue.

  “I swear the guy looked me straight in the eye before he… Well, before I knew it, the kid… you were being flung into the road. The woman was screaming. She ran out after you, pushed you out of the way, but… Betty just… She tried to stop, but there was just no time.”

  “Wait! Wait a minute!” Ethan’s voice boomed. “Are you saying that Angel was pushed into the road?”

  The old man looked confused, his gaze skittering over my face as if trying to read me. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move, could barely even breathe. Ethan’s expression was grave, his hands rubbing over his paling face and into his hair. “Could you be mistaken about what you saw?”

  “There’s no mistake,” Schrader said bluntly, looking affronted. “I might be old now, but I played that day over in my head for the last twenty three years, son. And besides, the guy wouldn’t have been so keen to bargain if I’d got it wrong.”

  “You spoke to him? Well, what did he say?” Ethan hissed with mounting frustration.

  Mr. Schrader dabbed at the fine layer of sweat that was forming on his brow, his gaze darting between Ethan and the front door as if he was beginning to regret opening it. For the first time since we’d arrived, he seemed unable to meet my eyes. “You need to know that what happened that day… Well, she wasn’t a bad woman. We’d been unable to have children of our own. Betty—she couldn’t hold on to ’em, had one miscarriage after another. She took to the bottle to help her cope with the loss, the emptiness. In the end she needed a drink just to be able to face the day.”

  “Mr. Schrader,” Ethan persisted, his tone weary with frustration. “We sympathize with your situation, but…”

  “She had a string of DUI offences, you see. She’d already had her license revoked. If we hadn’t played along, she would have done jail time—”

  “Mr. Schrader, please. Tell us what happened. What did the man say?”

  The old man nodded, holding his hands up in surrender in response to Ethan’s elevated tone. He took a breath, seeming to brace himself before continuing with his story. “What happe
ned next was a bit of a blur. I wasn’t even sure who we’d hit at first, because the kid was on the ground sort of curled up in a ball—”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was intentionally dissociating me with the child in his memory because he was trying to distance himself from the event, or because he was having difficulty uniting the child with the woman before him.

  Without correcting himself, he carried on. “—but the crowd, they were running further down the street, gathering around something I couldn’t see in front of a parked up van. By the time I’d worked out what had happened and climbed out of the pickup, Betty was hurling her guts up on the sidewalk. She could barely stand. Then I realized that with all the attention focused on what was going on up the street, nobody was paying any attention to us. I figured that if I kept quiet, maybe everyone would think I was the one that was driving... So I told her to run. When I turned around, he was there in front of me—the guy. I didn’t even have time to think because he was up in my face, and I just knew that he’d seen Betty. I’ll never forget what he said to me or the sinister threat behind it. The look in his eye, it was cold, callous… evil.”

  Ethan delivered his words with slow portentous persuasion. “What did he say?”

  The old man blinked. “He said, ‘Keep your mouth shut.’ Then he nodded to the puddle of vomit over on the sidewalk and added, ‘If you talk, so will I.’”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Ethan hissed through clenched teeth, getting up to pace the length of the small room, his fingers running over his face and into his hair again.

  When I didn’t react, Schrader searched my glazed expression, a look of remorse settling onto his aged face. “I tried to comfort you… before they took you away in the ambulance. You wouldn’t tell them your name, just kept on repeating that you wanted something—a toy maybe. We couldn’t make out the name, it was just a letter—B or E, or something. The only other thing you seemed bothered about was that you’d scuffed your shoes. Your tiny bottom lip wouldn’t stop trembling as you frantically tried to fix them, smoothing the shiny red leather back into place.”

  My gaze flickered to his, his words waking me from the trancelike state that I’d retreated to. He must have interpreted the sudden flash of recognition in my eyes as anger, because his next words came out rushed, seeming to plea for my understanding, my forgiveness. “I’m sorry. Sorry that you lost your mom, and sorry I lied for my own selfish reasons. But please try to understand, Betty wouldn’t have lasted a day inside. I didn’t think telling the truth would help anyone, and it certainly wouldn’t bring your mom back—”

  “You son of a bitch,” Ethan came to an abrupt halt in front of Schrader. “She’s spent her entire life blaming herself for that accident—sentenced to a life of purgatory by her entire family because they all believed what the eyewitnesses said. You were the only one that saw what really happened.”

  “I thought she’d remember. I thought she’d tell the police, give them a description of the guy who was trying to snatch her. How was I to know that she’d lose her memory?”

  For a second, I thought Ethan was going to combust with fury and exasperation, his clenched hands outstretched as if he were trying to refrain from hitting the old man.

  “Ethan.” My single word, though spoken quietly, seemed to startle the two men, because it was the first word I’d uttered since arriving.

  You see, Ernest Schrader’s account of what happened that fateful day seemed almost transcendental at first. The ravages of time and forgotten horrors had left my memory in a tangled mass, a sort of swollen knot of complicated, interwoven enigmas. Recently the frayed edges of that knot had been picked, and gradually the truth was unraveling.

  Slowly, something was occurring to me, entering my mind in an eerie, flimsy-like way. At first it teetered on the edge of thought, just a tiny fragment of a concept really; difficult to grasp, barely perceptible, and almost not even plausible—almost.

  I reached for my purse, retrieving my cell and quickly typed a name into Google. Within seconds a clear photographic image emerged onto my screen, the face looking back causing my breath to catch in my throat. “Would you know him? The man who pushed me in front of your car—if you saw him again?”

  Ernest Schrader didn’t falter when he answered, “In the blink of an eye.”

  Taking a fortifying breath, I passed the cell to Schrader. “Then tell me—is this the man?”

  Ernest Schrader took the cell warily from my grasp and stared down at the screen. It was an instant reaction, the way he physically recoiled at the sight of the picture. His sickened expression provided me with the answer I was dreading, his ensuing words only confirming what I already knew to be true. “Yeah, that’s him.” He glanced up at me, horror blending with sheer disbelief. “Jesus Christ, do you know him?”

  His question hit me like a bolt of lightning, sparking fury and fear and disbelief deep within the core of my heart. The blood drained from my face as a fine sheen of sweat misted on to the surface of my skin.

  “Angel?” Ethan’s voice dripped with fear.

  Suddenly my stomach roiled, bile rising from the pit of my stomach to vehemently invade my throat. Somehow, I managed to gather myself, swallowing down the threat to vomit, and rose to my feet. When I reached the door, I turned to Ernest Schrader, finally finding the strength to answer.

  “Yes, I know him. He’s my father.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  We spent the entire journey home in silence, consumed in our own private horror. No words were adequate to ease the impact of what we’d just learned, not for either one of us. I could feel the intensity of Ethan’s gaze on the back of my head as I stared unseeing out of the passenger window, could picture the concern in his eyes as he glanced between me and the road ahead. But my man knew me well, because he did not speak. He was giving me the time he knew I needed.

  When we left he’d followed me silently out of Schrader’s house, and taking me by the hand had led me carefully to the car, where he’d gently kissed the top of my head before buckling me safely into my seat.

  Ernest Schrader had trailed behind us, dabbing at his runny eyes. I’d asked him one last question before we drove away. What had happened to his wife? It turned out that my father’s malignity that day had resulted in more than one untimely death. Betty Schrader had been unable to live with the guilt of being drunk behind the wheel of her car when it struck and killed my mother. The pain of loss was all too familiar to her and so she’d swallowed a bottle of vodka along with a plethora of sleeping pills exactly one month after the accident. She’d more than paid her dues for her foolish mistake. She may have been a drunk, but she was no killer. Ernest Schrader had kept his word to my father to protect her, and later to protect her memory. His penance was that he’d lost the woman he loved because of that day too.

  And all the time, the one person who was to blame had gotten away with it.

  I’d played them over and over in my head—Ernest Schrader’s words. When he’d described how my father had tried to murder me, and in doing so, had inadvertently caused my mother’s death. The added burn came with the knowledge that he’d spent the last twenty three years outwardly blaming me for his own crime. And because I’d accepted culpability, I had also unwittingly protected him.

  Somewhere in my mind I’d known all along what had happened that day. It had been boxed and sealed and buried inside my fucked-up mind—by choice. My unwillingness to face my demons had ensured his crime remained a secret. So he’d continued to drip feed his poisonous lies that I was to blame, nurturing my shame and guilt, knowing that as long as I suppressed my memories, the truth would remain buried. There was no doubt of one thing—he was an indisputably capable psychologist.

  Somehow we’d arrived home and Ethan had parked the car without me even being aware. After taking my hand and helping me from the car, he guided me into the elevator and we took positions on opposite walls, facing each other.

  It was the first time since Schra
der’s revelation that my gaze had focused on anything, when it sidled up Ethan’s long, lean legs, over taut abs and strong shoulders. The expression on his face was so chock-full of extreme, mixed emotion that it was impossible to read. His gaze penetrated mine, a look so intense it was soul deep and heart-shattering. Every muscle in his perfect body was stretched and rigid, the pulse in the dip of his collarbone racing wildly, and suddenly I could read him with the lucidity of pure crystal glass.

  What I saw raging behind those burning blue eyes was so powerful I could almost reach out and touch it. It radiated off him in scalding, electric waves. I saw a man hell-bent on revenge. I saw a man capable of murder.

  As the realization materialized, I felt overwhelming fear spiking through my body. I shook my head frantically. “No, Ethan.”

  For a brief second, he closed his eyes, his hands fisting at his sides, as if furious with himself for not having the strength to mask his riotous thoughts and emotions adequately.

  The elevator door slid open and with weighted shoulders, he stalked through the foyer and into the open lounge. I followed at a pace, my mind working frenziedly for a way to calm him down, to get him to think clearly. He reached for a bottle of bourbon, pouring a couple of fingers full into a tumbler and knocking it back in one swift gulp. Then, turning, he gripped me by the shoulders.

  “Angel, listen carefully. I want you to wait here. I’m going to call Jackson to stay with you—”

  “No! No, Ethan! We need to think about this. Work out the best way to—”

  “Best way to what? Let the fucker get away with it? Let him win? No fucking way, Angel. I’m not going to waste a single second. That cocksucker starts paying today for the hell he’s forced you to endure. I’m going to torture the fucker slowly until he remembers every last detail of what he’s put you through.” His tone was chilling, filled with murderous hostility.