No Less Days

by Amanda G. Stevens

  Simon tilted his head and appraised David anew. “Huh. Well, yes, she was. Fiercely determined, too, that there had to be something to cure him.”

  She entered the room with a set to her mouth that hinted she’d heard everything, but the firmness dissolved as she met Simon’s eyes. “Would you … until … I just can’t right now.”

  “Don’t go far.”

  “I promise.”

  They hugged each other, and Moira stood on tiptoe and pressed a kiss to his cheek. She met David’s eyes as if she would say something, ducked her head, and left the room.

  Simon wandered over to sit on the couch, leaned his head back, and shut his eyes.

  “Ought she be alone?” David said.

  Simon sighed. “Better not to argue with her about a short distance. Might prevent the longer.”

  The aftermath. Theirs to weather now. David sat at the other end of the couch and lowered his face to his hands. And prayed. But the words came between chasms of something he couldn’t call grief; he hadn’t known Colm well enough to claim that word for him. These others had. They had loved the man. Their sorrow oozed alongside their betrayal and confusion, fresh and raw, filling every space in the house. David was no counselor, but he could recognize an emotional triage situation. Zac’s distress was only the most visible.

  All right then. Yes, he was remembering the saber hilt’s hardness against his palm and fingers, the resistance and give of its lowering, the sound as it struck through to dirt. But those things could be processed later. These others needed someone apart, someone who could see straight.

  His purpose for now.

  He got up.

  A single tear squeezed from Simon’s eye and dripped down his temple into his hair as he sat with his head back. Zac hadn’t moved.

  Triage. What did a man need when the damage sustained wasn’t in his body?

  Instincts stirred, long unused. David went to the kitchen. He got two cans of chicken rice soup from the pantry and set them warming in a pot on the stove. Coffee? No. He found a bar of dark chocolate and chopped it fine. No milk chocolate in the house, but a bitter version would suffice. Milk and half-and-half from the fridge, sugar and vanilla extract from a cupboard—ach, that bottle was dusty—and David began a concoction he hadn’t bothered with since Ginny. A concoction she always said was his greatest kitchen skill.

  The soup was warm first. David left it on low while he brought the milk and half-and-half just below simmering, removed the pan from the burner, added the chocolate and watched it resist a moment before melting. He added the rest of the ingredients, whisked it, and poured three mugs. He ladled three bowls of soup. He would eat later. No sound stirred from any other room. He might have been alone in the house.

  Ladies first. David took a bowl, spoon, and mug into the library, where the light bled around the cracked door. Moira sat in the chair, head down, arms around her knees. She looked up when he entered. Her eyes were nearly swollen shut, her face a mess of new tears, her hair sweaty. David set the bowl and mug on a shelf and leaned down to her.

  “Think you could eat?”

  “I’d prefer not to,” she said.

  “You feel sick?”

  She considered the question. “I guess I don’t.”

  “Come then. Try a few bites.”

  She sat up and took the bowl, spooned a testing mouthful of broth and then another that included a bit of chicken. From there, she finished the soup, slowly, eyes closed. David traded her the soup for the chocolate, which was no longer steaming but still hot. As she sipped it a tear fell.

  “Thank you, David.” She wrapped her hands around the mug. “Did Simon eat?”

  “I’m about to offer him some. Will you join us?”

  A crinkle formed between her eyes. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  David squeezed her shoulder. She sipped the chocolate, and another tear fell.

  “I keep getting this … pain.” She pressed her palm to the center of her chest. “Here. And these thoughts. That he isn’t dead. That wherever he is now, he tricked us into sending him there.”

  “Moira.”

  She leaned into his arm, too tired to know she was doing it. “I can’t face it, David. I’m going to have to, but I can’t.”

  “No more facing things tonight. Just be here with us.”

  “I … I’ll try.”

  David wrapped a supporting arm around her and walked with her to the kitchen. He set her empty bowl in the sink and picked up the other two and their spoons. The steam had wafted away, but the bowls warmed his hands.

  Moira picked up another mug. “If anything will bring Zac back to us sooner, sugar will. But don’t expect him to take the soup now.”

  “Then the soup’s for me,” David said.

  Simon accepted the food with quiet thanks. While he and David ate, Moira bent to eye level with Zac.

  “Zac.” Her voice was quiet, gentle. “This isn’t a microwave imitation; it’s the real thing. Can you smell it?”

  He gave no sign of hearing her. His only movement was the rise and fall of his chest.

  “You should try some. The chocolate’s not too sweet, and David didn’t even scald the milk.”

  No response.

  “Moira,” Simon said quietly. “It’ll be hours yet.”

  “Once he came back in forty minutes.”

  “Once.”

  “I just want to try it. If he doesn’t take any, I’ll let him be.”

  Simon sighed and sipped his own chocolate. “Can’t hurt him.”

  “Exactly,” she said and raised the mug to Zac’s lips. She tipped it carefully, one hand cupping the back of his head, though he didn’t need the support. A deliberate touch for the sake of contact.

  After a few seconds, his Adam’s apple dipped. His breathing deepened. He swallowed again.

  Moira took the mug from his lips and brushed her fingers through his hair. “That’s it, Zachary, that’s it.”

  He blinked.

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  Zac’s fingers curled at his side. Another blink, and he met her eyes.

  “Zac, are you here?”

  His gaze roamed the room and settled first on David then on Simon. He didn’t look for someone else to be there. He didn’t jolt as if seeing them all without Colm had reminded him what happened tonight. He seemed to be absorbing the sight of each of them, as if he’d lived fifty solitary years in one catatonic hour.

  Moira brought the mug to his lips again. This time he drank immediately. He took the mug from her and drained it, parched from whatever desert he’d been lost in. He lowered it with steady hands.

  “What’s the time?” he asked all of them.

  “About ten,” David said.

  “At night?” He looked toward the windows and frowned at their darkness.

  “You were gone only an hour,” Moira said.

  He looked down at the mug between his hands, and red stained his cheeks.

  Simon sipped his chocolate and raised his mug to Zac. “Good stuff, huh?”

  “Seriously impressive.” When he tried to smirk, a wrinkle formed between his eyes.

  After a little while, Zac ate some soup, and tension eased from Moira’s face. Nothing more was said about his spell of silence. Or about anything else, for a time.

  David had provided for their physical needs as best he could, and each of them seemed stronger than before. Warm food could fortify the soul as well as the body. They had shelter and safety here; all they needed now was sleep. Healing wouldn’t begin without it.

  It wasn’t exactly a vigil, but as long as they sat up, he would sit with them. They asked him for stories of himself and told some of their own, none of which included Colm, until Simon interrupted a sleepy lull by standing and stretching and turning to all of them.

  “For a short time we were five. Now we’re four again.”

  “Yes,” Moira said, and Zac nodded.

  “Only we could stop him. So we did. A
nd we rest with that choice. And speaking of rest.” Simon pinned them all with a look almost fatherly. “If I’m tired, I know the rest of you are. Time we gave David his house back.”

  David nearly said it wasn’t necessary, but maybe it was, for all of them.

  A night alone, a long sleep. Yes. He saw his guests to the door. Shuffling footsteps, hushed good nights, and then the door was shut and the rental car’s taillights were disappearing down the street.

  David folded onto the floor and sat with his back against the door.

  He got up and went into the back bedroom.

  He stood in the tiny closet and looked around. What was he seeking? A message from Colm, scratched with a fingernail into the paint on the wall? David shook his head and put away the sheets and other storage items he’d dragged from the closet. Screwed the lightbulb back into the ceiling fixture. He fetched a screwdriver and returned the bathroom doorknob to its rightful place. Ten minutes, and the jail cell was a closet again.

  He went to his own room and showered away the sweat and dirt of grave digging. He pulled on flannel pants and went to bed. Alone in the dark, the choice remained as clear as it had been, but faces drifted before him now—imaginary, conjecture, a brunette woman with pink lipstick on her way to a job interview, a balding man with a paunch and twin grandkids on the way, a dark-haired twenty-something college student engaged to be married to the girl he’d known since elementary school. Maybe Colm’s victims had looked like them.

  No more victims. David pulled the bedcovers up to his chin and tried to sleep.

  Sitting up in bed. Cold sweat. Heart pounding. Lungs squeezing shut. David clutched the sheet in both hands and fought for breath. A nightmare. A dark, violent nightmare, not a memory—well, not anything now, he couldn’t even recall the—

  Tiana. Colm and Tiana, his last victim, her blood—

  “Lord.” He kicked the sheets away and staggered out of bed, dropped to his knees. “She’s all right? She’s all right.”

  His heart took long minutes to stop racing. He looked at the bedside clock. Not even midnight yet. He’d fallen asleep less than twenty minutes ago. This might prove to be a long night.

  Wait…. He lifted his head to listen. Now that his breathing had quieted, a buzzing noise found him from another room. He padded out to the hall and followed the sound. His phone, vibrating, incoming call.

  Tiana. His pulse tripped. The dream images flashed. “What’s wrong?”

  “David, thank God.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Jayde. If there’s any way you can possibly come.” Unshed tears drew her voice tight.

  He shuffled the phone from one ear to the other as he dressed. “If she’s in danger, you need to call the police.”

  “Chris locked her out of the house. He’s in there right now and won’t let her in. He took her car keys.”

  “Is it her car?”

  “Legally? I don’t know. He sold it to her or something, about a year ago. I’m going to pick her up, and I’d rather not go there alone.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  She gave a strained laugh. “Chivalry lives. When she called me, she asked if I was with you.”

  David held the phone between his ear and shoulder and tied his shoes. “If she wants me to commit assault and battery on that bully, she’s picked a good night for it.”

  Tiana was quiet long enough for him to regret the words. He locked the house, got in his Jeep, and headed southeast.

  “You’re home?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. I’m on my way.”

  “Thank you.” A quiet sniff. “I’ll let you drive now.”

  “No.” The word came too fast. “That is, I’d like to talk.”

  “What about?”

  “I’ve got no topic in mind, only hearing your voice.”

  “You realize how unhelpful that is.”

  “It’s all I have at the moment.”

  She was quiet, then, “I prayed for you today. Almost constantly.”

  “I apologize for the radio silence.”

  “I hope you’ll let me listen, but I know you might not be able to.”

  Let her listen. No demand, only a precious offer. “Tiana.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Nothing. That is … thank you, and I hope to be free to talk about it. In the meantime, your prayers are coveted.”

  “You don’t have to covet them if I’m already giving them.”

  The chuckle filled him, a salve on the day’s open blisters. “You know Jayde likely asked about me hoping I wasn’t with you.”

  “When I said I was calling you, she said okay.”

  Well, but what else could she say under the circumstances?

  Tiana sighed. “You don’t know what you’ve already done for Jayde. You didn’t fire her when you had the right to. You would have tossed Chris out on his rear that day if she’d let you. I’ve heard you ask for her opinion and put it into practice when you think she has a good idea—making the front counter more efficient or inviting or whatever. Do you think Chris has ever done that? And she’s only worked for you a few days.”

  “None of that should be unusual.” And tonight the same old story made him feel wearier than it normally did. David flexed his fingers on the wheel.

  “She’s been with Chris for three years. She puts up a confident front when she’s at work, but that’s not the real Jayde. I know I’m talking behind her back, but I have to at this point. She is terrified, David, and not of him. She’ll go back to Chris before she’ll quit school, and right now, financially, those are her two options.”

  High time a third option presented itself, then. David forced his tired mind into a higher gear than the speed of sludge. He didn’t have a solution by the time he parked in the visitor lot of Tiana’s apartment building. She was waiting for him in the carport.

  She rolled down the car window as he approached, and he leaned in. “You want to drive?”

  “I want her to recognize my car. Get in, Valiant Hero.”

  He chuckled and obliged her. He tilted his head back but kept his eyes open, watching the traffic out the windshield.

  Dirt raining into the grave, onto the tarp. Clinking shovels and rustling trees.

  “David.”

  He jolted awake.

  “We’ll be there in about two minutes.” Tiana gave him a quick smile as she drove.

  He scrubbed his palms over his warming cheeks. “I am so sorry.”

  “And I’m sorry for dragging you out of bed. There, now we’re even.”

  He blinked his dry eyes a few times, sat up straight, and peered at the passing surroundings. Wait, where were they? Farther south than he’d thought.

  “How long was I sleeping?”

  “Well, you got quiet about an hour and a half ago.”

  “Tiana.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Jayde drives ninety minutes to work?”

  “I thought you knew that.”

  He shook his head. Chris the moron aside, he wouldn’t want Tiana driving around this area alone at night. She parked at an apartment building that did nothing to relax him, then texted Jayde. They waited, but the foyer doors didn’t open.

  “She should be outside by now,” Tiana said.

  “Might he have taken her phone?”

  “She called me after he locked her out.”

  That didn’t mean Chris hadn’t stormed out after the call and stolen phone as well as car keys. David motioned Tiana to stay in the car and got out, scanned the area. At least the floodlights worked. The parking lot needed repaving, but so did plenty of parking lots—and roads—in Michigan. The immediate area was quiet, no troublemakers that might try to harass Tiana. He nodded to her without leaning down to expose his back.

  Deep breath. This wasn’t a battlefield. Aye, okay.

  “Come on,” he said, and Tiana nodded. He took her hand and held it to his side as they approached the doors. “How’ll we �
��?”

  Tiana tugged on the door, and it opened.

  “You can just walk in?”

  “Yeah.” She grimaced as they stepped inside. “This is not the best place to—oh.”

  Chris had crowded Jayde into a corner of the foyer. Her back wasn’t literally against the wall, but close enough.

  “And another thing,” Chris said, “stop calling your girlfriends every time we have a little fight. It’s nobody’s business but ours, and you’ve got no right—”

  “Hey, Chris,” Tiana said.

  He turned, saw them both. “What is this?”

  “Um, you left her stranded in the foyer, you loser. I came to pick her up.”

  “Get out,” Chris said and turned his back on them with an egoist’s confidence.

  Touching him first would be a mistake. The kind that could end up with police on the scene and battery charges. David crushed the desire to crush the man’s face and stepped up beside him instead.

  “Jayde?” The way this night ended was up to her.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jayde blinked at him, eyelids smeared with leftover makeup remover. She was wearing a baggy nightshirt with a unicorn on the front and cotton pajama pants covered in running text.

  “You came,” she said.

  Aye. The word nearly came out, the result of too much unfiltered conversation lately and five hours’ sleep in the last two days. He nodded instead.

  “Okay.” Jayde drew herself up straighter and picked up a little black purse that had been dropped in the corner. “Let’s go.”

  “What?” Chris still stood in her way, but now she stepped around him. “Baby, you can’t just do this. We’ll work it out.”

  “Good night, Chris.” Jayde walked to Tiana like a woman stepping out of the rubble of an earthquake, each footstep surer as the ground held. Both of them started for the doors.

  “I said no.”

  As Chris moved to block Jayde, David blocked Chris. He spoke to the women without breaking eye contact with the man who had frozen in front of him.

  “Go to the car.”

  “Going,” Tiana said.

  Behind him the doors opened. Shut.

  “Meddling moron,” Chris said.

  David took one step toward him. “Blustering coward.”