“As soon as the door opens,” Martin said, “get in the car first. I trust you’re not stupid enough to run away without her.”
Kayleigh wrapped her arms around Sean’s neck, squeezing hard. “I want my daddy!”
Sean turned toward Martin. “You’re right,” he said, his voice rising to be heard over her cries. “I’m not going anywhere without her, so can I at least put Kayleigh in the backseat and buckle her up myself? I’ll talk to her and calm her down. Or do you want a sick, screaming kid bringing attention to us when we get in your car?”
Martin glared at Sean, shifted his focus to Kayleigh, and then back to Sean, holding his gaze for several long moments. “All right, go ahead. But do it from the driver side of the car where I can watch you.”
“Thank you.”
“Just remember,” he said, his eyes piercing with peril, “I learned to shoot as a kid, so don’t test me.”
Moving forward, Sean lowered his foot on the garage step and pushed the button to raise the door. As had been the case since the day a spark inside his panel box cut any remaining overhead lights, the garage remained dark with the only visibility provided by the early afternoon grayness. Sean experienced a brief moment of gratitude that the problem still existed.
The passing seconds as he watched and waited for the door to fully open seemed endless, a repetitious battering ram reminder that his plan could be the last one he’d ever have. Dead men weren’t known for new ideas. Sean steeled himself in preparation for the precious few seconds awaiting the execution of his scheme. If he hesitated at all, they’d be killed.
Before taking his first two steps, Sean consoled a weeping Kayleigh as he stood close to Martin, speaking at a level just loud enough for him to hear. But as he carried her toward the car, moving at an unsuspicious, deliberate pace until reaching a distance he judged out of Martin’s earshot, he spoke in an urgent whisper, relaying rapid instructions he needed her to hear and understand immediately.
There wouldn’t be a chance to repeat them.
“Kayleigh, listen to me. The garage door’s open, and we need to escape. I’m going to put you down and tell you to get in the car. But you’ll refuse and in a loud voice, say, ‘No.’ Then I want you to reach up to hug me again, and when I lift you up, hold me as tight as you can and stay perfectly still. Don’t move!” Sean leaned his head back a few inches to look at her. “Nod your head if you understand me.”
Kayleigh stared in apparent incomprehension for several moments. Then she nodded.
Sean lowered her to the ground facing the car door and opened it.
“Get in, Kayleigh,” he said, raising his voice again.
Kayleigh stared into the car, shook her head in a violent motion, and yelled, “No,” before spinning around to grab Sean.
“Come on, Kayleigh, do as Martin says.”
As he prepared to lift her, the pounding of his heart accelerated into a mad drum solo when Martin stepped from the doorway into the garage.
“Get her in the car!”
In an air horn instant, Sean charged from the garage in a protective posture with Kayleigh braced against his body, ensuring that nothing remained exposed. And, for a moment of freedom, escape seemed possible until a crippling explosion of pain in his lower back caused him to stumble forward and collapse--but not before managing to twist to his left to shield Kayleigh from the fall. As his hands clawed at the ground, feeling as if someone took a torch to his tissues, he wondered if this is how it felt to die.
Lifting his face from the concrete, he struggled to look around, hoping Kayleigh fled. What he saw and heard however, through the haze of suffering and semi-consciousness, seemed like a dream.
A blurry streak of green crossed Sean’s vision as a woman’s scream, reverberating in an up and down voluminous pitch, echoed near him. A man’s voice, angry, loud, and powerful, penetrated his awareness before morphing into sounds of gunshots and manic shouts. He didn’t understand why he visualized a war scene. Where was he? Did he hear sirens? Everything seemed smaller, as if the world shrunk into a noisy box of light and dark, shadows hovering around him, coming and going. Somewhere in time, lacking any perception of how much, an indistinguishable figure knelt before him, holding his hand.
He heard a voice, unintelligible sounds floating in and out of his fading attentiveness, and as he struggled to speak before the encroaching blackness enveloped him, he uttered one thing. “Kayleigh.”
He didn’t hear the reply.
“She’s safe.”
Chapter 39
When the Michaels family visited him in the hospital, Sean learned how much he didn’t know, starting from the time Kayleigh acted as if she needed to use the bathroom.
“Here’s my birthday present,” she said, holding her cell phone. “It was in my jacket the whole entire time.”
Sean stared as if looking at a guitar made on Mars.
“I didn’t really have a tummy ache, but I pretended so I could text my brother, Mr. Marine. He was the only number I had ’cause he put it there for me.”
“I can’t believe it,” Sean replied, speaking in a weakened voice from his bed. “You’re an amazing girl. And a great actress.”
“I tried to let you know in secret when I told you I was going to do what Coby did,” she explained. “Remember what you said to me about Coby sending a message to people with cancer?”
As his head lay on the pillow, Sean smiled, a combination of affection and curiosity. “Yeah, I remember.”
Beaming with pride, she exclaimed, “Well I sent a text message!”
Sean failed to fight back tears as Stephanie handed him a tissue to his free hand, the one opposite from the side with the intravenous tube. Then she took one for herself before describing the rest of the story.
“I was so scared,” she said. “When Anthony showed me Kayleigh’s text, I called nine-one-one immediately, but my son refused to wait for them. He’s a marine now, and he was going to save his sister, no matter if it cost him his life.” Stephanie dabbed at her eyes again. “Just like you, Sean. You could have died. We can never repay you.”
In a simultaneous motion the three adults wiped their eyes as Kayleigh and Randy watched.
A sudden recollection filtered through Sean’s memory from that murky period of time just after being shot.
“Was Anthony wearing military gear?” he asked. “Green military gear?”
“Yes,” Jason answered. “He arrived earlier that morning still wearing his uniform. And even though that guy had a gun, Anthony charged at him like a wild bull. He got off one shot before our son was all over him. He beat that guy up so bad, it took two policemen to pull him away.” He shook his head, his eyes closing for a moment. “We’re so proud of him. For what that bastard could have done to my little girl--and to you--” Tearing up again, Jason lowered his head and walked to the window, staring out in silence.
Kayleigh shuffled closer to the bed. “Mr. Music,” she said, “when you’re all better, I want you to see my new poster of another place I want to go to. It’s a big garden in Canada called the Bu...Bu...”
“Butchart Gardens,” Stephanie said.
“Yeah, that’s it!” Kayleigh shouted. “The most biggest, most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to go there.”
At that moment, navigating its way through the gelatinous haze of painkillers and fatigue, from a long abandoned part of his soul, an idea for a song hatched in his thoughts.
“I like the gift my sister brought you,” Stephanie said, holding the stuffed animals in her hand. “Two bears sharing an umbrella. It’s cute.”
“Our first date was on a rainy day, so there’s a little meaning there. Same with the card that comes with it.”
Stephanie read the words aloud. “‘When things go bad, and the rain starts to fall, call me at one-eight-hundred PARASOL.’”
Sean smiled to himself, remembering Jenny’s parting words when he lay immobile in bed, weakness permeating his body
and a tube dripping medicine through his arm. Feeling the wetness from her eyes as she leaned down to kiss his forehead, cheeks, and mouth, she lingered in that position for several long moments before brushing her lips against his ear, whispering a healing remedy of her own. “There’s a lot more where that came from, Mister Hightower.”
A short time after the Michaels family left, Sean looked toward the door in surprise when Stephanie poked her head back in.
“I didn’t know if you’d be sleeping,” she said. “There’s something I want to tell you.”
Walking to the bed, she looked down at him and stared, teary eyed, without saying anything for several moments. Sean offered a tentative smile, confused and questioning.
“What is it, Stephanie?”
Nodding her head, she started with a question. “Do you remember a few months ago when you called to change Kayleigh’s time for her guitar lesson, and I told you about another test she had to have? And how worried I was because we needed to come up with a five-thousand-dollar deductible?”
Sean looked at her in silence, wondering where this was going.
“Yes.”
“I never told you this, but through a miraculous coincidence, somebody made an anonymous contribution for that exact amount. And thanks to the results from that test, Kayleigh’s medicine was changed and her markers have improved.”
Sean turned his thumb upward. “That’s great news, Stephanie.”
She stared in silence again, placing her hand on his face. “My mother used to always say, ‘Things happen for a reason,’ but I didn’t believe that stuff.” Stephanie chuckled. “Now, I’m not so sure anymore. The way things have gone this last year, I’m wondering, maybe, just maybe it’s true sometimes, you know? Maybe we moved next door to Sean Hightower for a reason.”
As tears formed and fell, she leaned down to kiss him on the forehead before turning away to leave.
Chapter 40
The morning after returning home from the hospital, bored and incapable of doing much while still recuperating, Sean stared at his closed guitar case in the corner of the bedroom, recalling the idea for a song arising from Kayleigh’s enthusiasm over her Butchart Gardens poster. Hesitant to turn his thoughts into action, he waited until the afternoon before removing the guitar to start playing. Within an hour, before winter’s early sunset arrived, a new song sprang forth, and Sean couldn’t remember a time when the marriage of music and lyrics united as quickly. Reflecting on that, he realized that for the first time ever, a hit record wasn’t the intention he desired nor the reward he sought. Somehow that goal didn’t seem as high and mighty as before. And over the past sixty minutes he rediscovered his roots--writing for the pure, unpolluted pleasure of the music.
***
He sat in a beach chair with a guitar on his lap and a walking cane within reach to his right, listening to the rhythmic beat of the beautiful, blue Pacific. Sean felt at peace as he enjoyed the final day of free time before starting a full-time job as a car salesman at his father’s dealership. With Jenny in his life now, all the previous chaos and uncertainty about his place in this world didn’t seem relevant anymore. For the first time in many years, the balance from his priorities seemed right again. He almost died--an occurrence to instill perspective like no other. If he didn’t gain enough of an appreciation after his cancer scare, he garnered a full-blown awareness from a bullet. And he could laugh at his arthritis now. What was a little hip pain once in a while when he came frighteningly close to living life on Wheelchair Way?
When he listened to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” on his car radio, the billionth time he heard it, the two chorus lines affected him in a unique way, and he recognized their relevancy to his life. Listening to Jagger sing about not always getting what you want, he felt that truer words had never been spoken. In a perfect world, he wanted to make it big again in the music business, but only in the rarified air of the very few were situations in life seemingly perfect. Perhaps for Mick and Keith it turned out that way, but not in the lower stratosphere he occupied. That second line, however, about sometimes getting what you need, defined his life today. The dream of what he wanted proved an elusive fantasy he couldn’t get. But the reality of what he needed, Jenny’s love...well, nothing equaled the importance of that.
It was time to say goodbye to the past.
Testing the sound of his new chord change, Sean strummed his guitar, preparing to sing the opening verse to “Imagination Airlines,” a song dedicated to the little girl who retrieved his soul by reminding him that life was more than just a one-sided coin of negativity, and that the value of life was equal to what you put into it, even if only through your imagination.
As he looked up, watching several seagulls glide in majestic configurations, he started to sing.
“No limit to my starry sky
No desire too extreme
There’s so much to believe in
’Cause I dare to have a dream
No place is much too far away
No matter where it lies
On Imagination Airlines
I just have to close my eyes.”
Sean smiled, envisioning Kayleigh’s delight when she heard a song written for her. He felt good about himself, and, as he watched the waves pound and engulf the shore, offering a timeless, soul-enriching music comparable to no other, his gaze danced across the water, reveling at the open paradise of new possibilities from that horizon beckoning him once again.
THE END
Author’s Note
Coby Karl played in seventeen games for the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2007-2008 season, averaging 4.2 minutes and 1.8 points per game.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After several years devoted to poetry, followed by a few minor achievements as a professional song lyricist, Keith Steinbaum eventually decided to write a novel, culminating in the completion of The Poe Consequence, a supernatural thriller/human drama that received Books-and-Authors.net’s Supernatural Thriller of the Year, Kirkus Reviews’ listing as a top Indy book of the year, and a Finalist placing in 2017’s International Book Excellence Awards competition.
His forthcoming second novel, published by Black Opal Books, is entitled, You Say Goodbye. It’s a whodunit murder mystery featuring The Beatles, a one-hit wonder ex-rock star, and a little girl with cancer who’s a big fan of the LA Lakers. The child’s character was inspired by the life, and unfortunate death, of Alexandra Scott from the Alex’s Lemonade Foundation.
Although Steinbaum pays the bills through a long career in the landscape industry, in his heart he’s always considered himself a creative writer first and foremost. As he’s often replied when he’s asked about his license plate that reads, Do Write, he makes his living through landscape, but he makes his loving through writing.
Please visit his website at KeithSteinbaum.com
GENRE: MYSTERY-DETECTIVE/SUSPENSE
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, businesses, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental. All trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, and registered service marks are the property of their respective owners and are used herein for identification purposes only. The publisher does not have any control over or assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their contents.
YOU SAY GOODBYE
Copyright © 2019 by Keith Steinbaum
Cover Design by Jim Avery
All cover art copyright © 2019
All Rights Reserved
EBOOK ISBN: 9781644370940
FIRST PUBLICATION: FEBRUARY 23, 2019
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