Merryn
It’s a bright, sunny day out. Jake and I walk down the street, each holding the hand of little Nathaniel, who’s walking between us. Birds are chirping, other pedestrians smile at us. Nathaniel looks up at me.
“Mommy,” he says, and I smile down at him. “Do you love daddy?”
“Yes,” I reply. “I love your daddy very, very much.”
I look up at Jake and he’s smiling at me. We keep walking.
“Mommy,” Nathaniel says, and I smile down at him. “Can we go play in the park?”
My stomach lurches. The park. A child’s playground set atop a concrete foundation, separated from the sidewalk by a chain link fence. The park is by my practice … in a bad part of town.
“Are you sure you want to go there, sweety?” I ask our son.
“Yes, mommy,” he says. “Let’s go to the park.”
I don’t say anything. I look around, wondering if I can steer us in a different direction, but I don’t know where in the city we are. We keep walking. Jake doesn’t say anything.
“Let’s get some ice cream,” I suggest, but Nathaniel replies.
“No. The park.”
He’s gripping my hand hard. We keep walking. Soon enough I see it, there in the distance. Nathaniel picks up the pace, almost dragging Jake and me. Jake doesn’t say anything.
We get there and I look through the fence. Inside are my clients—all of my clients—sitting on the playground, smoking crack and injecting heroin into their veins. Nathaniel lets go of my hand, giggling as he runs through the fence’s opening and into the playground.
“No!” I scream, but I can’t go in after him. Instead I stand, helpless, gripping the chain link fence and watching him start to climb up to the slide. Some of the clients are watching him. One of them gets his attention, offering him a needle full of heroin.
“Don’t worry,” Jake says next to me. “I’ll get him.”
But it isn’t Jake’s voice. I look over and see Will Silver standing next to me. He’s smiling widely, a gun in his hand, the same gun he had in the Bullets’ warehouse. He lifts it up and points it through the fence, aiming it at my son.
“NO!” I scream, but it’s too late. Flame licks from the barrel of the gun as a shot cracks through the air and I jerk awake.
I’m sitting in bed. Not my bed. Not my room. I feel my brain struggling to catch up. Trista. I’m in Trista’s room.
My heart is going a mile a minute. My skin is damp with sweat and the baby in my belly is squirming, dancing uncomfortably on top of my bladder.
I throw the sheet off and climb out of bed, managing to get to my feet on the second try. It’s still dark. I don’t check the time. I open the bedroom door and pad out into the hallway, going into the bathroom and turning on the light.
When I’m finished on the toilet I wash and dry my hands, then turn off the light and step out into the hallway. My head turns and I look at the doorway to the other bedroom. It’s closed. That’s where Trista is sleeping, in there with her mother. The memory of that woman on the bed still haunts me. I guess I was just shocked to see someone who looked like that. Trista told me that she went into a catatonic state when Sal died, but it looks to me more like shock than anything else. I mean, the woman still responded when Trista fed her baby food. She just didn’t make any movement otherwise.
It was the death of her son that caused it. My heart breaks, thinking about Sal. He shouldn’t have died. That shootout shouldn’t have happened. It wouldn’t have happened, if it weren’t for me. Craig would never have rallied up the Bullets and Slingers. He would never have tried to torch Jake’s garage.
But there was nothing I could do. I just showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That is true. That Slinger, Skeeze—the dead one—he was really the one who started things. What happened would have happened even if I wasn’t there.
So then whose fault was it?
Maybe it was nobody’s fault. Maybe it was just fate. Maybe all of this was supposed to happen no matter what, and we’re all powerless to stop it.
A wave of loneliness washes over me. That’s a depressing thought, to think that it was fate that Jake and I would split up.
No, don’t talk like that. You two haven’t split up. You’re just going through a rough patch.
Sure, Merryn. Remember what you tell your clients: You have to own up to your own mistakes. The only way to get past something is to admit that it’s real and acknowledge that.
What I did was a mistake. That much is certain. But does that mean that I deserve to have my life tossed away, just like that? Hasn’t Jake ever heard of best intentions?
This is getting nowhere. I turn back to Trista’s room and quietly make my way in, closing the door behind me.
The sheets feel damp and clammy as I climb back into bed. I lay down on my side, one of Trista’s pillows under my swollen belly. I’m facing the wall opposite the window. There are streetlamps on outside, casting an eerie glow about the room. I close my eyes, but sleep feels like it’s far away. Like I can’t quite reach it. I’m in a black void, trying to move towards sleep, but it’s sliding away from me at the same pace that I try to reach it. My baby stirs inside of my belly, maybe trying to get comfortable too, unable to sleep. I relax my muscles, letting them sink into the mattress below me.
The window in Trista’s bedroom is open. Every now and again I hear the sounds of a car or people out walking. Sometimes voices, sometimes not. My mind floats, wandering. My body’s uncomfortable, but with this huge belly there are only so many positions I can actually sleep in.
And then I hear it: the rumble of an engine. But it’s not a car this time. I recognize this sound.
It gets louder and louder, sounding like it’s stopping right outside the window. And there the sound stays constant, not moving on. I open my eyes, and instead of a dark bedroom I see that the air surrounding me is filled with a white mist. That rumble of a motor is still there. I lift my head from the pillow, feeling the sheet slide off of me. Turn my head, and the bedroom window is illuminated by the streetlamp outside.
Jake?
I get up from the bed, walk in bare feet around it and approach the open window. Grabbing onto the ledge I stick my head out and look down.
There he is. Jake. He’s sitting on his motorcycle, which is vibrating underneath him, the exhaust sending thick plumes out into the white mist that’s surrounding him, surrounding both of us. He’s looking up at me.
“Jake?”
My voice sounds dampened in all this mist, and I wonder if he heard what I said. If the sound waves even managed to travel to his ears. But he nods his head. He did hear me. My heart is beating harder. Is he really here? What’s he doing here, so late at night?
“Jake, what are you doing here?”
“Merryn,” he says. He sounds far away through all this mist, even though he’s not fifteen feet from me. “I’m sorry.”
A tear rolls down my cheek. “You’re sorry?”
He nods. “For everything. For how I acted. For not trusting in you.”
“Jake …” My voice is cracking now, and another tear rolls down my cheek. “You hurt me so badly.”
“I know,” he says. “I know, and I’m sorry. But it wasn’t my fault.”
What? “What do you mean? It wasn’t your fault?”
“You know how I am,” he says. “And you trusted Will Silver. After everything he did. Why did you go into that, unarmed, unprotected?”
“I … I …”
I’ve thought about this so many times since the surprise Will gave me at the warehouse. Why did I go in unprotected? Is it because I actually trusted that he would do the right thing? Or is it just because I wanted to think he would do the right thing?
“I just wanted things to be better,” I finally say. “I thought Will could help us. I didn’t know that would happen.”
Jake shakes his head. He doesn’t say anything. A wind comes rushing down the street, heading towards us. The sound of it drowns out the rumble of his engine.
“Jake?” But the rush of the wind is too strong. “Jake!”
I have to close my eyes against it, feeling it almost knock me to the side, into the wall. When I open my eyes Jake is gone. His motorcycle is gone. I can’t hear the engine anymore. The mist is still around me.
I pull my head back in. I’m not crying anymore. I walk barefoot back to the bed and climb in. The sheet doesn’t feel damp and clammy now. Laying down on my side I close my eyes and feel my body relax.
When I open them again the mist is gone. It’s no longer dark; sunlight fills the room with an ambient glow. I sit up in bed and look behind me at the window. It’s open, but now there are just the normal sounds of people and cars. It must’ve been a dream.
I throw the sheet off and get out of bed.