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

I exhaled in a long, slow hiss, and as the air left my body, crushing defeat entered.

“Are you okay, sir?” she asked.

“No, I’m not,” I said, shaking my head. “Not even close.”

I left and started down the road that’d lead me back home, again, for the second time in twelve hours. Now there was truly nothing I could do. Out of options. Thanks for playin’, pal, better luck next time. And who was Holly, if not somebody from Starbucks? I guess it didn’t really matter.

I made it home. Silent. Empty. The same monument to bleakness as the day I moved in. I took the phone from my pocket. Nothing. It hadn’t rung in two days. How many more days would pass until it would?

I took two Xanax and three shots of whiskey, then I moved the chair to the window and sat looking out while teetering between feeling angry and feeling sad. The dizziness hit twenty minutes later. Then I lay on my back and waited for sleep to take me someplace far away. I didn’t care where, just as long as it was somewhere other than where I was.

6

Every time I woke, the pain was still there. Still there, waiting to be dealt with. I took more pills and fell back to sleep. When I couldn’t sleep I thought of Carolyn, of how badly I wanted her here and how everything would be fine if I could just see that dreadful smile of hers again, if I could just stare into her beautiful green eyes. If only I could hear the way she’d laugh on the late nights when neither of us felt like sleeping, then everything would be just fine. That’s all I wanted. The world to go back to the way it was. I wouldn’t fuck it up again. I wouldn’t.

7

On the third day, I was out of Xanax. Then there was nothing left to do but take the pain and regret and swallow it down like its own jagged little pill. Nothing to do but let it all come and hit me like the trains roaring past my window. Fuck those trains. Let them pass, let them come right through the wall, for all I care. What did it matter? It didn’t. Carolyn was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. It didn’t matter at all.

thirty-three

1

YOU DON’T THINK I can do the shooting, do you? That since I’ve put it off this long, I’m just going to casually skim past? Perhaps I’ll ignore it entirely, pretend it didn’t happen? No, I won’t, because I can tell it. I can and I will. Why? Because fuck you, that’s why.