by JC Ryan
Moments later, one of the police stopped him and asked in Spanish why he appeared uninjured. Only then did he remember to speak Spanish. He explained he’d been getting coffee when the explosion occurred. He grasped the policeman’s uniform and begged to know what had happened.
“Terroristas,” the man replied, grabbing Rex by the wrists and pulling his hands away. “Vete a casa,” he continued. Rex nodded, though the command to go home made no sense to him, until he realized the officer didn’t know he was a tourist. His dark eyes and black hair, coupled with skin that tanned easily and deeply, could easily be mistaken for a Castilian, though at 5’11”, he was a couple of inches taller than the average Spanish man.
He stumbled away. There had to be a way to find his folks, but if he interfered with the police and now with medical personnel, he’d be arrested. With a sinking heart, he decided to collect Jessie and decide what to do. Maybe go back to the motel where they had stayed the night before. From there he would be able to make calls to find out where his family was.
As he turned to step gingerly through the carnage, he heard a faint call. “Rex.” He went on alert, looking more closely at the grievously injured bodies lying nearby. The sights were hideous — torn flesh, tattered clothing mixed with scraps of wood and metal. And then he spotted remnants of a familiar scarf. “Mom!”
He staggered toward her and dropped to his knees. Her open eyes were sightless. It hadn’t been she who called him. She wasn’t breathing, and he couldn’t bear to look at the wreckage that was her lower body. Oh, Mom.
There was no time to grieve right now. He looked around for his dad and siblings. They must not have been standing close together, he thought, as he couldn’t see them. Then a faint movement of the badly burned body nearest his mother’s caught his eye. He scrambled toward it, recognizing his sister only by the bracelet she wore. He’d given it to her for her sixteenth birthday, only weeks ago.
Horror-stricken, he gazed on her face, burned beyond recognition. “Quinn? Oh, my God! Quinn!”
“Hurts, Rex,” she whispered through burned lips. Her chest rose and fell rapidly as she gasped for breath.
He didn’t know what to do. Would touching her increase her agony? As he looked around frantically for a medic to call over, a wheeze brought his attention back to his sister. Her chest no longer moved.
“Quinn!”
But she was gone.
Tears coursed down his cheeks, and he threw his head back and let out a primal scream.
“Nooooo!!!!!”
Chapter Three
Sandy Hook, Newtown, CT February 12, 2005
“REX?” THE FEMALE voice conveyed both question and concern.
Rex flopped one arm over his eyes. Next, light would invade the room in Jessie’s wake, and light was the last thing his head needed. With the other hand, he searched blindly for a can with something left in it, a little hair of the dog. Empties rattled as he rummaged among them, and then one that wasn’t quite empty tipped, spilling what he needed.
“Crap,” he muttered.
“There you are! Rex, why aren’t you up? I told you I’d be here to help you pack at nine a.m.” Her reproach was familiar. Over the past eleven months, he’d heard the same tone of voice far too often. He felt guilty about it. Her frustrations were justified, and he was the sole cause of them. In the eleven months since his family was killed, Rex had lost it, he had become a directionless, self-pitying drunkard.
“Sorry,” he muttered. The sound of the blinds opening made him squeeze his eyes shut more tightly, but the light still crept past the protective arm and the closed eyelids. “Damn, too much light!” he grumbled.
“Rex Dalton, are you drunk again?” Jessie demanded.
“Umph.”
“You’ve got to stop this,” she scolded. “Come on, get in the shower. At this rate, you won’t have everything packed by the time escrow closes. I’m here to help. Where are the boxes?”
“Dint get any,” he slurred. He was going to be in more trouble with her, but he’d decided against packing. “Sell it all.”
“What? Rex, take your arm off your face and talk to me.”
“Can’t.”
She didn’t answer, just let out a long sigh, but the sound of her footsteps retreating toward the kitchen convinced him she wasn’t going away. He groaned again and rolled from the sofa to the floor. It was a bad idea. His head had been pounding before. Now it was thrumming like the plucked string of a giant bass fiddle, and his stomach was threatening revolt as well. He let one eyelid open a sliver. The hardwood floor beyond the area rug was littered with beer cans and Jessie’s feet were approaching.
“Rex! For heaven’s sake, are you all right?” Her knees hit the floor in front of him and her hands lifted his face. “What am I going to do with you? You need counseling. It’s been eleven months!”
A flash of anger seared his temples like a sword thrust through from one side to the other. “Don’t say eleven months like I’m supposed to forget my family just because of lapsed time! You don’t know… you can’t know how I feel. Get out. I’m not packing today.”
“Rex…”
“Get out!”
The shout intensified the pounding in his head, but his eyes had begun to adjust to the light. They felt like someone had polished them with sandpaper, but he opened them anyway and looked at the woman he’d loved, until a bomb had extinguished that emotion in him forever. Now, every time he saw her, he was reminded why he hadn’t been with his family when the end came.
“Get out,” he said, more quietly.
“Rex, I know it’s the alcohol talking, so I forgive you. But if you don’t pull yourself together…” She left the rest unsaid. The threat that had brought him to heel more than once in the past few months.
Today, he couldn’t bring himself to care. He’d made a decision. One he wouldn’t tell her about just yet, because he wasn’t up for an argument or her scolding this morning. One that had changed his plans to put his parents’ belongings in storage and made him decide to sell everything instead. Everything was his, to do with as he wished. And he wished never to see any of it again.
The next thing he knew, the smell of burned coffee and a change in the angle of the light brought him around to full consciousness. His head was slightly better, but his mouth tasted and felt like a dog pissed in it.
“Ugh.”
He pushed himself to his hands and knees and used the sofa to pull himself to his feet. Now if he could only push himself to a full standing position.
Once upright, he swayed as he made his way to the kitchen in search of Jessie, the coffee, or a bucket of ice to thrust his head into, whichever he reached first. He found only the coffee. Burned as it was, it was going to have to do. He didn’t have the mental wherewithal to make a new pot. He poured a cup with a shaky hand and tasted it. Bitter and seriously overcooked, it was just what he needed. It would either dispatch the hangover for good, or kill him, and he didn’t much care if it was the latter.
After drinking half the cup, he remembered telling Jessie to get out. One more strike against him. He wasn’t sure how many he had left, but maybe it was better to get the last one and have her throw him out of the game. She wasn’t going to be happy with his decision. Monday, Valentine’s Day, was going to be a bitch.
He looked at his watch. Four p.m., too late to call the real estate agent on a Saturday afternoon. He’d have to wait until Monday, and the buyer wouldn’t be happy at the late change of plans, but there it was. He needed another week, maybe two.
***
HE’D BEEN IN shock when he left the carnage that was the Atocha train station in Madrid. He’d found his mother and his sister, dead and dying. He hadn’t seen his dad or brother, and by the time he’d gotten Jessie back to the motel, he was ready to go back and search. But before he left, policia were at the door, demanding he accompany them to their headquarters. He didn’t recall giving them the address.
A witness had come forward, they told him
. A passerby who thought it was odd he’d dragged a girl with him for several yards, then sat her on a bench and ran himself toward the chaos and not away from it. The same person saw him collect the girl later, and he’d followed them to the motel before reporting the odd behavior to the police. Rex tried to explain, but obviously the policia were nervous and would not let any lead slip by them, they insisted. He was a person of interest.
Hours later, when he returned to the motel, it was with more respect and condolences from his policia escorts. His willingness to talk with them in excellent Spanish, and without a lawyer probably convinced them he was who he said he was. They were convinced and told him so, he was a lucky man to have escaped the fate of his family. It was his first taste of survivor guilt, and the taste was so bitter he threw up again. Lucky? His entire world, except for Jessie, was gone. How could anyone think of that as luck?
Gone were his devoted and hard-working parents. His father, a high-school history teacher, had passed down to him his first love, history. Living as they did within an hour of the country’s largest city, New York, weekend trips to the finest museums were commonplace. His mother, an ICU nurse, worked the graveyard shift so she could be there for the kids, to give them breakfast before school and greet them and help with homework when they got home. In the hours between, she slept.
Gone were his brother, the kid who followed him everywhere, and his baby sister, whom he’d protected as a big brother should. His last moments with her were seared on his brain and in his heart. She’d been in pain, and he couldn’t help. He’d have given his own life to have them all back, and there were days when he considered joining them.
His mother’s and sister’s bodies were eventually released to him, after weeks of waiting. After he’d sent Jessie home and appealed to the US Embassy in Madrid to help him cut through the red tape of sending their bodies home, he’d finally bowed to expediency and allowed their cremation. But his father’s and brother’s remains were never identified.
Chapter Four
Sandy Hook, Newtown, CT February 14, 2005
“I KNOW, IT will cost me. It’s your job to keep it as low as possible,” Rex said to the agent first thing Monday morning. “Yeah, rent back is fine.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” his agent replied.
She’d been a peach, he thought. He wasn’t the easiest of clients, and more than once she’d had to reschedule a showing because he was in no condition to make the house ready for it. She’d managed to sell it anyway, and for a tidy profit. Sandy Hook was one of the fastest-appreciating areas of the city. One edge bordered the Housatonic River, with its historic and scenic byways, and the region fully enclosed the Upper Paugussett State Forest, where the Dalton family had taken full advantage of camping, hiking, and biking opportunities.
The tragedy that would take place seven years later and rock the nation with the deaths of twenty-seven people, mostly six- and seven-year-olds, was unimaginable in the placid, slow-paced, smallish suburb of Davenport, Connecticut.
Rex ended the call to his agent and mentally prepared himself for the next one. It was Valentine’s Day, and he hadn’t spoken to Jessie since he’d thrown her out of the house two days before. She would expect an apology and a date. He’d give her both, if she would accept the former. The outcome of the date wouldn’t be that of a typical Valentine’s Day, but it couldn’t be helped.
He had a deadline.
“Jess, it’s me,” he said unnecessarily. Her phone would have told her who it was. He was fortunate she answered, he reckoned. “I owe you an apology.”
“Yes, you do,” she answered in an aloof tone.
“I’m sorry. I truly am. And I haven’t had a drink since then.”
“Good to know, but hardly impressive. It’s only been two days,” she said.
She wasn’t going to make it easy.
“Will you forgive me?” he asked.
“Already have. You know I can’t stay mad at you. But you need to get help, Rex.”
“I know. I plan to. Can I take you to dinner tonight?” he asked, adding, “It’s Valentine’s Day.”
“I know what day it is, Rex. I’ll go to dinner with you on one condition. No booze.”
“Done,” he said. He’d already decided to quit drinking. He wouldn’t have the opportunity anyway, soon. Might as well get on and stay on the wagon. “I’ll pick you up at seven?”
“Seven it is. Sober.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He decided to save the rest of his news for tonight. After he’d thrown her out the last time, it probably wasn’t a good idea to spring helping him with an estate sale on her as well.
By seven-fifteen, they were ensconced at a secluded table in the nicest restaurant he could get a late reservation for. It seemed the entire town was going out for dinner. He should have made the Valentine’s Day reservation at least two weeks ago. But this restaurant was nice enough to impress Jessie. Hers was a working-class family, like his.
Rex had known Jessie since middle school, though they’d only dated since his senior year of college. The community, with a population of fewer than twenty thousand when his parents had married, was tight-knit and had only one middle and one high-school. The latter boasted an extensive language department, though, and it was there that Rex had discovered a unique talent – the ability to pick up languages quickly and the rare ability to then speak them without a discernable accent.
Even now, Newtown wasn’t a large town, though a stranger wouldn’t have been able to tell. Centered among larger cities and still within the New York metropolitan area, the well-populated region had half a dozen or more neighbors whose borders melded with Newtown’s. Like most of his friends and those of his siblings, Jessie’s family had held to time-honored middle-class values like a strong work ethic and pride in their homes. In Newtown, no one expected a handout.
Jessie and Rex fit each other like the proverbial gloves, and he hated what he was about to do to her. But his life had changed forever on that March morning in 2004, and the darkness within him was no good for her. He still had enough decency in him and respect for her to acknowledge that he owed it to her and the memory of his love for her to set her free. The timing sucked, though.
He decided to leave the news until after their meal and dessert, to let her at least enjoy those. But she knew him well enough to sense something was afoot and forced the issue.
“What did you mean, the other day, when you said you weren’t going to pack? You said something about selling it all,” she added.
“Let’s don’t talk about that now,” he tried.
“Let’s do,” She hissed. “You know I love some of your mother’s things. You didn’t seriously mean you were going to sell everything. Why would you do that? Don’t you want mementos at least?”
“Jessie, please. Not now.”
“When, then?” Her jaw was set in that half-annoying, half-endearing way she had of wringing out of him all his secrets.
Their food arrived at that moment, and they set aside the conversation by tacit agreement until the server had departed. Then she fixed him with an expectant stare, and he had no choice but to answer.
“No,” he said slowly and distinctly, so he wouldn’t have to repeat it. “I don’t want mementos.”
She set her fork down and drew a deep breath, as if to marshal her thoughts for a rebuttal.
“Don’t say it,” he warned.
“Okay, I won’t argue with you right now. But tomorrow, we’re going to have a serious discussion about grief counseling. You must move on, Rex. This is destroying you. It’s destroying us.”
“Jessie, I’m serious. We are not discussing this right now.”
“That’s what I said,” she retorted.
They managed to get through the main course without the argument escalating, but the tension was palpable. When their server came to ask about dessert, Rex was curt when he declined.
Jessie had opened the dessert menu, but when
she heard Rex say no, she closed it and snapped, “None for me, either.”
The server beat a hasty retreat, muttering that he’d get their check ready.
“You could have had dessert,” Rex said, making an effort to be nice about it rather than snarky, though that’s the way it came out.
“Not in the mood,” she said.
The check came then, and Rex paid with cash, telling the server to keep the change. He stood and slipped on his winter coat, then helped Jessie into hers. They walked to the door without touching or speaking. Outside, he held open the car’s passenger side door for her and walked around the back to get into the driver’s seat.
“Now,” she said, tight-lipped, “we are going to discuss this. I won’t ask what’s got into you, but the Rex sitting in this car with me is not the man I fell in love with. I want him back.”
She’d given him the perfect opening. “He’s dead,” he said.
“Rex, you act as if I don’t grieve your family, too. It’s unfair. I loved them. I think, though you’ve given me no reason to believe it since that day, that I would have been one of them if it hadn’t happened. You are not dead. Your life is not over. Get used to it.”
“You misunderstand me,” he said. “That Rex is dead. This Rex has a mission, and as soon as I sell everything, and the house is through escrow, I’m going to get going on it.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“I’ve enlisted in the Marines,” he said. There it was, out, he had said it. Not the way he would have preferred to tell her, but she pushed.
“The Marines,” she repeated, as if she’d never heard the word before. “You enlisted in the Marines, without discussing it with me?”
His first thought was why would I have discussed it with you? But he had enough concern for her feelings left not to express it. “I did,” he said simply.
“I’ve waited nearly a year for you to return to your senses, Rex Dalton. Now you’re asking me to wait four more years, you’re sadly mistaken.”
