“I’ll keep that in mind for the next time the grad union...”
“No, I mean like right now, right here,” I interrupt with a grin. I kiss him again, this time moving from his lips up to his ear and nibbling playfully. I love that I can be like this with him. It’s like I’ve found the way out of my cage and can finally spread my wings.
“Seriously?”
“Sure, why not?” I answer. “There’s nobody here to make fun of us.”
Before he can say anything else, I gently take his cast-bound hand in mine and position my right hand on his shoulder. He laughs and kisses me softly, and then we begin our awkward swing dance around the tiny kitchen. It’s not as fun and exhilarating as when we went out together, especially since we barely have room to move, but I still feel like the luckiest girl alive as his beautiful gray eyes catch mine and draw me into them.
Owen sends me out for a spin, and I laugh and go along with it. My socks squeak on the linoleum as I spin away from him, but as he reels me back in, my hand catches something on the countertop. I glance over my shoulder and watch as a glass wobbles back and forth and then finally topples off the counter.
It shatters as it hits the floor and I stop dead in my tracks as glittering glass shards scatter everywhere.
“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” I stammer, feeling my face flush in embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to—I just accidentally hit it when...”
I look up at him and suddenly realize that he hasn’t heard a single word I’ve said.
He’s staring down at the floor and his eyes are wide and dark with panic. The color drains from his face as his breath comes in short, tight gasps, and I carefully tiptoe through the minefield of broken glass and wrap my arms tightly around him.
I’ve been doing better these last few days, but Owen’s nightmares are still close at hand.
He nearly jumps out of his skin at my touch but then quickly relaxes and leans into me as I hold him close. He raises his hand to the long, white scar on his jaw and runs a finger down its length. Whatever terrible, dark place the broken glass took him to, he’s back now.
“It’s over, Owen,” I whisper, leaning my head against his chest. I can hear his heart racing, pounding in his chest in terror.
“Is it?” he asks weakly, still staring down at the shattered glass around us. “How can it be over when I still might have to go back there?”
“You’re not going back there,” I insist, squeezing him again. “You’re going to get into your doctorate program and live your own life now. He’s never going to hurt you again. I won’t let him.”
“What if they reject me?” he asks, his voice trembling. “What if I don’t get in and have to go back—“
“They won’t,” I interrupt. “Everything will be just fine. I’m here with you no matter what happens and I always will be.”
He leans his head on my shoulder and hugs me tightly. I run my fingers through his hair and look down at the broken glass littering the floor around us.
“Since you’re still wearing shoes, can you go get the broom, please?” I ask him.
He nods and makes his way cautiously across the kitchen to the cupboard before returning with the broom and dustpan. I follow behind him as he sweeps, wiping the floor with a damp paper towel to catch anything he misses. I can take care of the mess myself—I’m the one who broke the glass, after all—but I know he’s trying to take his mind off of his flashback. I wish I could talk to him more about his nightmares, but I’m still scared to ask. He’s told me a lot, but I know I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’m scared that I’ll hurt him and that he’ll shut me out if I dig too deeply into his fears.
Owen might be my own personal savior, but inside, he’s just as hurt as I am. He needs me. I wish I could make his fears go away forever and give him the loving family he’s never had, but I can’t.
All that I can give him is me.
Tuesday, March 26 – 3:20 PM
Owen
The phone rings again behind me and I grind my teeth together as I spin around and silence the ringer. I should’ve just shut the damn thing off at the start of class. I’m teaching right now and whoever the hell is calling will just have to wait. It’s coming from my area code back out on Long Island, but I definitely don’t recognize the number. It’s not my parents—as if they’d ever call me again after that fight with my father—but whoever it is has been calling me all class long, over and over and over. The asshole hasn’t left a single message.
“Sorry about that,” I apologize to my students for what feels like the tenth time. “Now, where was I?”
“You were multiplying out the matrices,” points out student in the front row.
“I know where I was, buddy. It’s just an expression.”
“Right, so... you’ve got different dimensions for the matrices, so you can’t use the regular method of...”
Just as I pop the cap off my dry erase marker and get back to work, my phone starts vibrating loudly on the table behind me. I’m going to kill this person. Whoever it is, I’m going to kill him.
I spin around again, glaring down at my phone as if it’s going to feel ashamed of interrupting my class or something, and watch as it vibrates happily along the metal surface of the desk and falls straight off the edge. It clatters loudly as it hits the black tile floor, and a frizzy-haired girl to my left—Janine is her name, I think—giggles and then covers her mouth in embarrassment.
“Go ahead, dear,” I think. “Make fun of me and my stupid phone. I should’ve shut it off in the first place.”
I sigh as I walk around the desk and try to hold back the angry feelings bubbling up inside me. As if in response to the hateful thoughts zipping around inside my head, the phone goes silent as the caller hangs up. I catch one brief glimpse of the status bar—fifty-seven missed calls—before the phone starts to vibrate again.
Professionalism be damned; I’m dealing with this idiot right now.
“Sorry, folks. I’ll be right back,” I growl, snatching the phone off the floor. “Give me just a second to kill whoever this is and then we can get back to work.”
I stomp out into the hallway, slam the door behind me and answer the phone as it starts to vibrate again. Fifty-seven calls? Seriously? It’s all I can do not to shout into the phone as I answer it.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I hiss angrily into the receiver. “Why are you calling me so many...”
“Owen Maxwell? That you?” asks the man on the other end, and my words catch in my throat as I recognize his voice. I’d recognize that odd mixture of country drawl and nasal Long-Islandese anywhere.
“...yes sir, this is Owen,” I answer quietly, all the fight suddenly drained from me.
“This is Bill Marino with the Montauk Police Department,” he introduces himself. “Do you have a second to talk?”
I know who he is. It’s been over seven years but I still remember his voice. I remember him coming to the house after Samantha died. Oddly enough, I remember his oversized brown hat, too. It’s strange what memories you’ll retain and what you’ll forget.
I remember the look on the sheriff’s face when I lied to him, when I told him everything was okay because I was too scared to beg him to help me. My father was right there behind him, staring at me through the whole interview. I remember that, too... the cold hatred in his eyes demanding that I say the right words or face terrible consequences.
Sheriff Marino knew the truth. He knew exactly what had happened to my sister and still did nothing.
The EMT looks over his shoulder at us and my heart shatters into pieces as he shakes his head. I already knew it deep down inside, but hearing his verdict feels like a knife in my chest. I duck under the yellow tape cordoning the staircase landing, shove past a protesting police officer and kneel on the carpet next to the EMT.
He reaches out and closes my sister’s eyelids. With her eyes closed, she almost looks peaceful. She’s finally free from the hell we’ve been tra
pped in, but the thought isn’t comforting me right now. My vision keeps blurring as my eyes fill with tears, and it’s all I can do not to start crying. Crying is a big no-no on my father’s list of manly sins and he’d only hurt me even worse for it once everyone else leaves.
She’s gone. My little sister is gone, and now I’m trapped here alone.
“Hello? Owen, are you there?”
“Oh... um, yes. I have a second,” I stammer, yanking myself away from my sister’s side at the bottom of the stairs and back to the phone call.
“I need to talk to you for a moment, if you don’t mind.”
“Can it wait until after I’m done teaching my class?”
“I promise it won’t take too long. It’s for my investigation,” he answers awkwardly. “Also... well, you need to know.”
“I need to know what, exactly?” I ask, dreading the answer. I’m starting to feel cold, and my heart feels strange and heavy. It’s that indescribable feeling when you know that someone is about to hurt you, but it’s going to be in a way you can’t possibly prepare for.
“Owen... your father is dead.”
I’m free. My mother is free. This should be the best day of my life. So why does it feel like someone just stabbed me?
And there it is—the pain I couldn’t possibly have prepared for, that I never would have guessed I’d even feel. Why does it hurt that he’s gone? I hate him... no, I hated him. He’s dead now and that should be it, but somehow it isn’t.
A cold numbness sets in as Bill’s words circle around and around inside my head. I’m free. Am I? I wanted Dad dead. I wished it so many times growing up, even as recently as last semester, but now I’m suddenly second-guessing myself. Maybe I didn’t really want to lose my family and instead just wanted to be free from them?
A sudden feeling of guilt washes over me. No! This isn't my fault. I didn’t do anything.
“Pull yourself together, Owen!”
“What happened to him?” I ask.
“Well, the official report isn’t in yet from the coroner but it was pretty obvious when I got to your house,” answers the sheriff. “He shot himself on Sunday.”
My house... it sounds so strange to hear him call it that. I haven’t lived there in five years. I abandoned that horrible place the second the dorms opened for my freshmen year. I wish I could say that I never looked back, but the fear was always right there in my rear-view mirror.
I take a deep breath and swallow hard before speaking again.
“You said you had questions,” I say, my voice suddenly much quieter and weaker than I anticipated. “I’ll answer them. What do you need?”
“I need to sit down with you in person and interview you,” he says. “I know Todd was up there to see you a few weeks ago, and I need to know what happened when he visited. I also need to get you on the record about... well, about what happened back when you still lived at home.”
My knees feel weak. I don’t want to talk about that—not with him. He knows what happened back when I lived there. He’s known about it for seven years, ever since Samantha died.
“I can’t come down there,” I tell him, almost hoping it’ll make him go away. “I’m in the middle of my last semester and I’m teaching a course on top of that.”
It’s true—I can’t come down there in the middle of the semester. Cornell has a leave policy for students, but it only covers the day of a funeral and some illnesses. It also inexplicably makes an exception for nuclear disasters. That particularly infamous clause fuels all sorts of hilarious rumors about the particle accelerator underneath the football stadium. It says nothing about traipsing off to Long Island for police investigations, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to my father’s funeral.
“That’s okay,” says Bill. “If you can find some time for me, I’ll drive up to you. How does Friday work for you?”
I want to tell him that Friday won’t work at all, that no day will work for talking about my father. I don’t ever want to talk about him again. I want to forget that he ever existed and move on. I can’t do that, though. I can’t just pretend that none of my childhood ever happened because it’d mean that I’d have to pretend that he never killed my sister.
I’d have to pretend that I never failed her and that she didn’t die because I was a coward. I can’t do that to her.
“Owen? You still there?”
“Okay... I can find some time on Friday afternoon,” I finally answer. “Did my mother give you my address?”
“Um... she sure did, but how about you just give it to me again, just to be sure,” he mumbles awkwardly. I frown as I listen to him fumble through his desk in search of a pen. Something about his voice and his reaction to me talking about my mother feels off. Something else is wrong.
He said that my father died on Sunday. Why am I only just now hearing about this on Tuesday afternoon?
“Um... Bill? Why did nobody tell me about this until now? Mom never called me.”
The silence on the line is almost deafening.
“Nobody... nobody told you, did they?” says Bill, finally answering me. There it is again, the feeling that he’s about to hurt me and that there’s nothing I can do about it.
Please don’t let this be what I think it is.
I hear the sheriff take a deep breath over the phone.
“Your mother is in the hospital right now.”
“What?” I shout into the receiver. My voice echoes loudly in the empty hallway and I hear my students gossiping nervously back inside the classroom.
“She’s down in Southampton Hospital, and just between you and me, don’t get your hopes up,” explains Bill. “She’s on life support right now but the doctors think it’ll take a minor miracle for her to make it.”
“What happened to her? Did my father do this? Why didn’t the hospital call me? ” I ask frantically, throwing question after question at him.
“Hold up a minute, buddy,” answers Bill, interrupting my string of questions. “I’ll be up on Friday and we can talk more then. I can give you all the information, the contacts, and all that sort of stuff when I’m up there.”
“Can’t you at least tell me...”
“No,” he interrupts, firmly cutting me off. “Technically, I’m not supposed to tell you anything at all, at least not until the court says I’m allowed to. I’m afraid you’ve got a lot of paperwork to do, kid.”
Paperwork... story of my life. Why can’t he tell me anything? I’m her son. I’m supposed to be taking care of her if she’s incapacitated now that Dad’s dead. It’s a twelve-hour bus ride, but I’ll go down tonight if I need to.
“Why can’t you tell me anything?” I ask. “Seriously, I’ll get on a bus and come down right now. Screw the leave policy—this is my mother we’re talking about.”
“Owen, you can’t see her yet. They won’t let you anywhere near her.”
“Why not?” I yell into the receiver.
“Because Todd disowned you, Owen!” he shouts right back at me. “You’re not in the will, and he even took blocked you from visiting in their advance health care directives. You’re removed from everything.”
I fall silent, stunned and at a loss for words.
“Even if you came down today, they won’t let you see her. The DA’s treating her as a material witness and told them to enforce Todd’s changes to the directives. You have no right of visitation. Legally speaking, you might as well not even part of their family anymore,” says Bill sadly. “We’ll talk on Friday. I promise.”
“Alright,” I answer, suddenly feeling weak and defeated. My head is spinning already at the news and I’m not sure how much more of this I can handle today.
It’s going to kill me having to think about this until Friday, though. I desperately need to know what happened. My mother was horrible, but she was horrible in a different way from my father. It wasn’t really her fault, either. He broke her. She snapped just like, eventually, I would have too.
“O
ne last thing before I go, by the way,” says Bill quietly.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s no love lost on my end,” I answer bitterly, but I wonder whether I’m trying to convince him or myself. “I hated him, you know.”
“I didn’t mean for Sunday. I meant for seven years ago,” he says and then he quickly disconnects the call.
I stand in silence as the clock on the wall overhead ticks deafeningly. All it took for everything to fall apart again was one phone call. I have no idea what to do now. My mind is swimming and my thoughts are flying in so many directions that I can’t make sense of them. Am I happy he’s dead? Am I sad? I just don’t know anymore.
Just yesterday, I was scared I’d have to go home. Now I don’t have a home.
My students are waiting for me.
I turn and quietly walk back into the classroom, gently closing the door with a click behind me. Without a word, I return to the dry erase board, grab my marker and finish off the rest of the question. I box the final answer and turn to face my class.
“Class is dismissed for the day,” I tell my students, not looking them in the eyes. If I do, I’m going to snap. I just know it. My voice cracks and I know that it’s only a matter of minutes before I break down. I need to get back to my apartment and away from all the people staring at me from their desks. Dark, scary thoughts bubble up inside me, and I need to find a place where I feel safe before they consume me again. I need to find a place where I don’t have to watch as my life falls apart.
I don’t want to be like this anymore. I thought I was done with the nightmares and flashbacks, but they’re back again. I thought I was getting better, or at least that I was past being a mental wreck all the time. So much for that.
“See you all on Thursday.”
I grab my notes from the desk and rush out the door.
Tuesday, March 26 – 8:10 PM
Maria
The kitchen timer rings and Tina calls out to me from across the kitchen.
Found (Lost and Found #2, New Adult Romance) (Lost & Found) Page 3
