No Less Days

by Amanda G. Stevens

  Tiana pressed her cheek to his chest then stepped back and led him to the break room. She tugged him down to sit beside her on the couch but didn’t let go of his hand. She looked into his eyes, and hers were clear and sure. The contrast to him right now.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “It’s …” He held her gaze, and the gentleness in her drew the words from the deep well in him that had never been heard before by anyone but God. “It’s like a flattening. Like I’m finally too old, Tiana. Spent.”

  Her thumb massaged his knuckles. “I don’t believe that.”

  “It’s a feeling.” He tried to smile. “Maybe not a fact.”

  “And you’ve prayed that you’ll be able to keep carrying everything?”

  He nodded. “You know Psalm 32, David’s bones wasting away through groaning. The sin I’ve learned about tonight, it’s not mine. But the man who’s done this—he’s not so different from me. He’s felt the same things. The years, the …”

  “The losses,” Tiana said.

  “Aye, the losses, they twisted his soul as I’ve felt mine twist at times, and who can say I won’t become …?”

  The exposed root of it all—he caught his breath as his own fear became known to him only now, upon speaking the words. He ducked his head, chin hitting his chest.

  “What if someday I do what he’s done?”

  “You will never do what he’s done,” she said with such conviction David nearly believed her.

  “The death of the body is a mercy of God, Tiana. The soul can’t bear endless years in this realm. In this evil.” His body rocked, and his soul seemed to do the same. “Make me strong enough, Lord God.”

  “No,” Tiana whispered.

  From his lips came a groan like that of the king of Israel, the psalmist after God’s own heart, a David who poured out deepest groanings and was heard.

  “Listen to me, David.” Tiana pressed her arm against his. “You don’t have to be strong enough.”

  Surely he did. He couldn’t set the burden down, that was clear enough. God Himself had placed it on his back.

  “Have you lived all your life carrying all of it alone?”

  “With the strength I ask Him for,” David said. “Not my own, I know.”

  “It’s time to let Him take it.”

  David shook his head. That couldn’t be true, not for him. Not for one from whom the mercies of age and death had been removed.

  “Unique circumstances don’t change that you’re His.”

  “I know.”

  “Doesn’t sound that way.”

  “What would you have me do?” The clip in his voice wasn’t only tiredness. She needed to back off.

  Instead, she pulled his hand into her lap. “I would ‘have you’ cast your cares on Him and let Him care for you.”

  The words were like a blow to thin ice, sending cracks throughout with a deafening sound. He shut his eyes. He held on to her hand.

  “Lord Jesus,” Tiana whispered. “Take this burden.”

  His throat closed. His shoulders heaved. His eyes burned. She wrapped her arms around him, and the tears took him.

  “Jesus,” she said, while he tried and failed to silence his sobs. “You’re good and kind. Be kind to David today, and give him rest. He hasn’t rested in more years than I can imagine. Please help him. Please show his heart that it’s okay to give his heaviest burden to You, that it’s what You’ve wanted for him all along.”

  The darkness fled. He was laid open before his God, and light poured into his soul, and its writhing grew still. David wept aloud.

  Tiana’s arms remained around him. He let himself lean into her, and she settled on the couch in a position to hold him up. Tiana whispered things he caught and things he didn’t, prayers for him. For his heart. For his peace. A long time later, he came to himself, no longer crushed. All the fragments inside were raw and new, but clean. He stirred.

  “Shh,” she whispered, but he had to speak.

  “Lord.” His voice reflected the hoarseness in his throat. Modern vernacular deserted him. His thoughts crossed into old Gaelic, but he kept to English in Tiana’s hearing. “Lord, Father, I confess to Thee … I have striven to be the strongest man alive, to carry the weightiest load, and in Thy mercy Thou hast led me to fail. I ask now for Thy forgiveness, for holding this distance between Thee and me. And I ask …”

  Tears surged into his throat. How could he have any left? Tiana moved her hand up and down his side, sweet gentleness in the touch. He cleared his throat. “I ask that in Thy mercy, I would become more truly Thine, nearer to Thee as long as I’m bound to these old bones on this old earth. Amen.”

  Wet warmth seeped into his shirt, the shoulder where Tiana had rested her head.

  “There now,” he said. “No tears for a blind man who’s clung to an error too long.”

  “We all do that.” She sniffed, and a smile touched her voice. “I want to talk to you about something, but now’s not the time.”

  “Fine a time as any.”

  Her hand moved to rub a slow circle on his chest. “I think you’re more tired than you realize. You probably shouldn’t be driving, even just home to bed.”

  Bed. The very word drew his eyelids down. He sighed.

  “Do you think you could sleep right here once the store opens? I don’t think you’d hear much if I shut the door.”

  “I’ve slept behind an artillery line firing mortars all night.”

  “Well then.”

  As if he were a child already asleep, Tiana eased off his shoes and lifted his legs to the cushion, then eased his head back to the pillow.

  “Are you awake enough to listen to me?”

  The soft quiet of her voice was enough to lull him the final steps to slumber, but he nodded against the pillow.

  “I’m going home to eat and make myself presentable, and then I’ll come back. That should be enough time to open at nine like usual. I’ll lock the doors when I go, and turn out the lights.”

  “Fine,” he said, or thought he said.

  From somewhere she produced that old blanket from his Jeep, the one that had covered Zac three nights ago, smelling fresh and airy. She must have taken it home and laundered it. She tucked it up to his chin, leaned down, and kissed him. David let his eyes close. He should text Zac so he wasn’t expected, but the effort seemed too much.

  “Rest,” Tiana said. “Rest your heart.”

  “Aye.”

  The light tread of her feet moved to the door.

  “Tiana?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Is it six now?”

  “About a quarter to seven.”

  “Wake me at ten. Things at the house … to deal with.”

  “Eleven?”

  “Fine.”

  “Will do. Now rest.”

  Darkness came from the other side of his eyelids as she shut off the light. Her steps faded, the break room’s door shut. David surrendered to rest.

  TWENTY-ONE

  He woke on his own at ten, as he’d ordered himself to do. It was a handy skill, honed by necessity over a long time of training his subconscious. Nightmares lingered like tattered veils at the edges of his mind. Colm’s voice. Rows of corpses. Paul Tait’s open eyes, and Colm’s hands around his throat, around the throats of people David didn’t know. He shuddered and sat up on the couch. Sunlight peeped around the edges of the shut window blind. David bunched the blanket in his hands for a moment and then stood.

  He smoothed his hand down his shirt and was jolted to another recent time he’d slept in his clothes. The night of his rejuvenation. Colm’s quiet ease, even with David, held a different cast now but felt no less genuine to David’s memory. No clues lingered in his subconscious, nothing wrong about the persona of the man.

  There’d be a great deal to face today. Time to do so.

  No helping his appearance. He hoped no customers were checking out as he headed to the front. Tiana manned the counter. Alone.
r />   “Jayde?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Not a word. Not even an ‘I’m still alive’ text.”

  A cold finger ran down his back at the last words. Events of last night, even the dreams perhaps, still gripped him hard. Tiana had come to work in a pale pink top and her most casual black dress pants, flatteringly cut but widening at the ankles in a way that seemed more bell-bottom than business casual. Her hair and makeup looked impeccable as always, so that he probably wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t last seen her with clean face and hair scarf. No one would guess that a half-coherent man had woken her up at five in the morning, that she’d been present at a crime scene hours before that.

  “How’re you doing?” he said.

  “Honestly, I think I’m putting off processing it.”

  He nodded. “Don’t do that too long. Talk to me if you need to.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re my only option.” She looked around the store. “I can handle things. Go deal with … the other things.”

  “Are you sure?” It tasted bitter, the thought of deserting her again. “I’m sorry.”

  “David, seriously, don’t worry about it.” But her pause held its own worry. “Okay, I’m just going to say this. I need to know something.”

  “Go on.”

  “When you said, about Moira … is it possible she killed him? Or was it one of the others?”

  With all the rambling he’d done in the wee hours of the morning, of course she had plenty of pieces to solve the puzzle. He leaned a hip on the counter. “It wasn’t Moira.”

  Tiana’s sigh was more of a gust. She studied him a long moment. “What’re you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “In the light of day, it’s always tempting to take it back.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your burden.”

  A lump filled his throat. He crossed behind the counter and gripped her hand. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Good.”

  She tugged him closer for a hug, and he held on a moment. So lovely she was. He linked his hands at her back and inhaled the sharp pleasantness of her scent, citrus and sage, shampoo and lotion and whatever else. Tiana tipped her face up, an invitation, and he kissed her. Soft, sweet, not needing to last. He pulled back, and she rested her hand on his chest.

  “Something to take with you on a tough day,” she said. “You know I’ll come if you want me to.”

  “Aye, I know it. Thank you.” He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed its soft palm. “If you need anything at all.”

  “Same to you.”

  Before he could leave, the Lambert family came in, greeting him the same way they always did, not seeming to notice the creases in his shirt or the shadows he knew left half circles under his eyes. Scottish complexion hid nothing, pasty as paper.

  “You’re leaving, Mr. Galloway?” the youngest girl said.

  “Briefly, I hope.” He smiled and prepared for a minute or two of polite small talk, but the vibration of his phone against his thigh rescued him. He pulled it from his pocket.

  Colm.

  “Excuse me, I’ve got to take this.” He nodded to the Lamberts and left out the back door, the entrance that remained locked from the outside and bore a sign No ADMITTANCE. Tiana once chided him for the choice of words, suggested something to encourage customers—PLEASE ENTER AT FRONT OF BUILDING. He had huffed and left the sign as it was.

  The heavy door thudded shut behind him, and he swiped the face of his phone before the call could go to voice mail.

  “Colm.”

  “Yeah. Hey.”

  “Should I assume you ditched them?”

  “I left Zac asleep in the chair, poor guy. He lasted longer than I thought he would.”

  A sense of the surreal dripped down David’s spine. He glanced back at the store. “Where are you?”

  “Been walking your town. I was starting to think there’s a shop on every corner, but you know the Lutheran church across from the yarn shop? It’s quiet here.”

  “True, it is.”

  “We need to talk.”

  He’d turned himself over to them. Surely he didn’t now want to speak in his own defense. Or perhaps he did. For all David knew of the man, he might have a second identity that wanted pardon. Only one thing mattered. Colm couldn’t be allowed to disappear.

  “On my way.”

  “I appreciate that,” Colm said then hung up.

  David texted Zac. COLM’S IN TOWN AND ASKED ME TO TALK. I’LL BRING HIM BACK. YOU TWO ALL RIGHT?

  The drive was about five miles, nearer the edge of town. David drove with one hand and held his phone in the other, waiting for it to vibrate with a response, his mouth drying as minutes ticked by. Colm had left Zac asleep in the chair … unharmed? Or …?

  When he passed the yarn shop on his right, he almost missed the rental car Colm had parked there. David pulled in and parked beside it as his phone buzzed.

  YES AND BE CAREFUL, Zac had texted back.

  He sighed, pocketed the phone, and walked across the street toward the church. A company of pine trees stood guard along either side of the entrance, all of them close to a hundred years old, maybe older, so tall one could stand under their branches without ducking. Colm stood beneath one and watched David’s approach. He looked as weathered as David felt, pale red stubble on his chin and a slight droop to one eyelid. His gaze roved past David to a boisterous group of teenagers who passed behind him.

  Colm had been people watching.

  David did the same sometimes. Not frequently, but when necessity forced him to a mall, he might as well sit a minute and look around at the generations as they flowed past in individuals. He halted beside Colm, stood with his back to the trunk of the old pine.

  “What do you see?”

  Colm turned his head only briefly toward David before looking back out at the passing groups, couples, families, loners. “Trees. Everywhere. I’m used to concrete and towering buildings, or tamed suburbia when I go to Denver for Zac. I haven’t embraced the quaint village effect in years, but it’s pleasant.”

  Let him dissemble, then. Made no difference now that Colm wouldn’t be leaving his sight. But he should have made a full escape, not called for an in-person chat. And David’s confusion gave Colm the upper hand.

  A minute later Colm’s eyebrows drew together, a slow crinkle knitting between them. “You expect me to call them insects or something. Flies for swatting.”

  Oh, honesty? Good then. “It’s a fair question.”

  “Sure. It is.”

  Time passed. They stood under the tree, side by side but no acknowledgment of each other, until Colm sighed.

  “They’re people. Senses, emotions, language, physical processes. Irreducible complexity.”

  “However?”

  “There’s no however. They’re souls. And they belong to the cycle of life, unlike us.”

  “Seems you’re finding your own way to fit into the cycle.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, David.” He stepped away from the tree and followed ten feet behind the latest group, a lagging pace that let others pass them on the sidewalk without overhearing too much. “I know she told you about Rose. Well, she told me about you too. All your wars. Distinguished service, no doubt. What’s your tally of kills?”

  David shook his head.

  “What, you stopped counting?”

  He’d had to. His fingers curled toward his palms. Not fists, cups of self-control.

  “You think it’s not the same,” Colm said as he looked both ways and then stepped into the street.

  They crossed but kept walking past the yarn shop, past their vehicles. “You don’t believe in just war?”

  “I’m not talking about war and murder. I’m talking about you and me.”

  Murder. He said it without hesitation. He knew what he was. Hair prickled on David’s arms.

  “You shouldn’t have killed those enemy combatants because you shouldn’t have b
een alive to do it. Outside the cycle yet interfering with it, see?”

  “Are you attempting to justify yourself somehow?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what is this?”

  “Perspective, that’s all.”

  For the coming debate. “Or persuasion.”

  Colm stopped walking. Stood in the middle of the sidewalk and forced other pedestrians to walk over the grass to get around him. He jerked his chin toward an easement between the yarn shop and its neighbor, a beauty parlor that never held more than one patron at a time. Pine trees stood watch there too. David stepped off the walkway and led him between the shops. Traffic sounds, voices, shop doors opening and closing all faded as they continued farther into the trees, as the carpet of needles over grass muted their footsteps. Anything could be said here. Colm stopped, stood facing David, arms at his sides, mouth tight.

  “Suppose I asked you to do it,” he said.

  The air charged. David tilted his head. Make Colm say what he meant.

  “Win for everybody—Moira and the guys won’t have to deal with me, mortals won’t have to deal with me, even I won’t have to deal with me anymore. And you’ve known me a week; it’s not like you’ll lose sleep.”

  Nothing in his expression, his tone, his body language betrayed insincerity. Adrenaline began feeding into David’s system. Tingled in his fingers. He shook his head.

  “Come on,” Colm said. “Think this through. Simon will want me dead, but he’ll be outvoted. Zac and Moira’s solution will be to buy some island and maroon me there for the next century. You think I’ll let them?”

  This—this was what God had purposed for David to do? Define justice and execute it? Be their vigilante? If this was the only way to prevent more murders, then he couldn’t cower from the duty. He had to carry it out. He had to carry the weight. For all of them.

  He turned away, braced his hand on the nearest pine, pressed his palm into the bark until it bit his skin.

  It’s why you found them. One more burden. Be strong now and bear up the weight.