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Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

Instead I turned back to Carolyn. Her hands were over her head, her body inflating with jagged breaths, contracting in sharp wails. I started to cry again, silently, and I knew that if I were any sort of man at all, then I would go to her and take her in my arms and tell her that I was sorry for so many things. I wanted to do this, for at that moment, I suddenly realized the pain to which I still held tightly had ceased being mine alone; it had become her pain as well, and in some odd way, it bound us together every bit as much as love did. But instead I just watched her, two feet away from me yet a hundred miles apart. Then I wiped my face on my sleeve and walked out the door. I could still hear her when I reached the bottom step, and even then, I knew that it wasn’t too late and that I could still turn around. I paused there and looked at the top of the stairs, where, on the other side of the wooden door, the only thing that mattered in my life lay crying in the middle of the bed we shared. But I couldn’t do it. I tried, and I wanted to, but I just couldn’t.

5

I didn’t know where to go, anywhere to stop feeling like an asshole, like I’d done something wrong. Had I? I couldn’t decide. I told her no and she went behind my back and wrote my father anyway. Those were the facts. Sure, maybe I should have answered her questions. But still, there are boundaries in every relationship each person must acknowledge. I had clearly established mine, and yet Carolyn walked right past them without batting an eye.

When I made it to the lake, I sat in the sand and placed my face in my hands and bawled. I couldn’t get the sound of Carolyn’s sharp wails and jagged breaths out of my head, or how frail she had looked lying facedown on the bed. It made me sadder than hell to think that she might still be that way, alone in our shitty little apartment. And of course, I missed my mother, as I always do that time of year, unhealed scabs yet again torn open. The anniversary of it all was only a week away. I shook my head. I couldn’t go on the way I was, and I knew it, but as Gene had said, “Fear will hold you prisoner for as long as you allow it to.” And so will the past, I realized. And it was my own damn fault for allowing both to do so.