Forever Twilight, Patrick Sean Lee [christmas read aloud txt] 📗

of making his way out of the ruined city toward home?

Inside, the room was brightly lit by the morning sun shining through the open-curtained window at the far end. His desk with his chair sitting a foot or so away. Clunky pictures on the walls, probably purchased at Walmart long ago. Something odd, though. His desktop was strewn with several files and pieces of paper, as though way back when he’d left in a hurry…or returned and begun working again, searching for? Knowing Daddy, everything would have been stacked neatly away in its proper place before he left for the afternoon. But as I quickly scanned the small office, there was no sign of his body. My heart sank a little.

Seven and a half long months had passed since the invasion. His office, at least his desk, was left untidy—not like Daddy—and his car sat abandoned on the street, without his body inside, or anywhere near it that I’d noticed. Something deep in my gut told me he’d survived, and further that he had to have returned to this place for some unknown reason. I turned to Peter who stood quietly, not looking around the empty room, but directly at me.

“Well?”

“He made it. I know he did, and he came back up here for some reason. Nothing else makes sense. Look at his desk. He would never have left it this way. He was doing something before he finally left.”

I know he didn’t want to say the next obvious thing, but he gazed sympathetically at me and said it anyway.

“If that’s true, he left on foot. Maybe it took him days to get back to your house…or maybe he never made it. I’m sorry.”

Yes, and attacked by a gang of thugs along the way. No, no no!

“We have to go back to my house, Peter. That’s where he would have gone, and by the time he arrived, Munster and I could have long vanished on our way to the cathedral or the farm.”

He raised his eyebrows, but he offered no objection as I skirted past him and made my way at a gallop toward the stairwell.

We left the building. I didn’t look again at Daddy’s abandoned car as I raced across the street to the pickup.

 

Ten minutes later we turned onto Birch Street. Neither of us had said a word. I kept seeing him roaming around the house, by now resigned to a new, horrible life all alone. Along the way my eyes shot in every direction looking for any signs that he might have come this way. Nothing. I prayed he’d somehow managed to make it back. If indeed he had survived, the odds were in his favor that he would eventually have made it unscathed.

Peter parked the truck, and I flew out, this time with Munster’s pistol in hand. Up the steps to the closed door. I turned the handle and pushed it inward, sending it banging against the coat tree. Peter was right behind me.

“Daddy?” I screamed.

No reply. He was off somewhere, searching for more food and water. He had to be. I ran to the kitchen and almost fainted when I rounded the corner. Mom’s body was gone!

“Peter! Look,” I said pointing between the island and the bank of appliances a few feet away, “she’s gone! Mom’s gone!”

I’d told Peter every detail of the aftermath of last Christmas. Everything. I darted to the rear windows above the sink and quickly scanned the back yard. There! A dozen feet away from the shed. The grass, now a withering stand of yellowed weeds. The earth had been upended, turned, packed back down in a low mound. A crude cross leaned precariously toward the nearby shed wall. Mom’s grave. He’d made it home! I stuffed the urge to cry in sheer joy, left the window and yelled again.

“Daddy! Are you here? Daddy!

“Peter, look in my bedroom. It’s through the living room to the left. Check the bathroom, too!”

I raced to his and Mom’s bedroom at the far end of the hall at the rear side of the house and flung the door open.

Empty. But the bed lay unmade, the sheet and covers thrown off against the far side. Mom would never have left to start the day, leaving it unmade. She wasn’t anal about life like Daddy, but it was in her constitution, learned or otherwise, to be orderly when it came to basic housekeeping. I could only come to one joyful conclusion. He’d returned, maybe days or weeks after the attack, lovingly buried Mom…and he’d stayed. I turned.

“Peter. Anything?” I shouted. A moment of silence, and then from the bathroom…

“No. You didn’t make your bed before you left,” he said with a slight chuckle. “Bathroom’s a mess, too, but nothing in here.”

I ran to join him. “But he’s been here!”

“Obvious someone has been. What now?”

“We wait until he get’s back. He’s out looking for food or water. I know he is!”

Peter’s countenance fell at my suggestion; my probably out of place instruction to the other half of me. The rational part of me. He narrowed his eyes and slowly looked off to the side. I knew he had no intention of hanging around, waiting maybe in vain for Daddy’s return. Hours, or perhaps days? He very well knew that it was a crap shoot whether he’d even come home again. If he was alive. But who else would have taken the time to dig a grave and then put Mom in it? He had to have been the one. He stayed, it was a certainty, but for how long?

Oh God, where are you, Daddy?

 

“One night,” Peter said. “If he doesn’t return by morning, the chances are he…oh, Amelia, he might not even be alive.”

“Don’t say that! I know he is.”

“Even so, there’s a good chance that if he did make it, he stayed for a while, and then left. There isn’t a thing to eat here. For all you know he’s gone house to house cleaning out the pantries. Moving on to God knows where every week or so.”

“Then I’ll look in every house on the block.”

“It would be easier to find a bullhorn.”

A bullhorn? “Go get one,” I said.

“What? I was joking! Where the hell would I find one?””

“Back in Marysville. We need some food anyway. Just go to Albertson’s or Ralph’s. They have poster board there. I’ll make a bullhorn. Pick up some Scotch tape, or masking tape while you're there.”

His eyes opened wide when I spoke. “You’re serious?”

“Yes I am. Leave me the shotgun just in case. It should only take you fifteen, twenty minutes at the most. I’ll be fine, and I want to look around some more, anyway.”

“You shouldn’t even be here. We shouldn’t. This place hurts you.”

“Just go, please.”

I followed him outside to the truck, retrieved the shotgun I’d used on our trip to San Diego, snatched a box of shells, and then returned to the house I’d grown up in with the two most important loves of my life. Back when the world made sense.

I walked through the house, glancing at the memories assaulting me, hanging on the walls, sitting on the tables and the rear kitchen counter, and turned the lockset on the rear door. Daddy hadn’t bothered to bolt it…this morning? Yesterday?…when he left. Making my way through the overgrown weeds outside that by now had turned a golden yellow and touched the tops of my calves, I arrived at the mound of Mom’s grave and knelt down. A rush of tears came to my eyes. I lay my face onto the weedy earth just below the raggedy cross.

“Oh Momma, it was so unfair. How I miss you, but at least you have a decent resting place. I love you. I promise that when I find Daddy, we’ll come back and build a shrine. Right here. For you. Help me find him. Keep him safe.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L.A. Not

 

Peter walked calmly beside me in his patient way as I called out Daddy’s name from the sidewalks, first on my old block, and then the next, and the next. There was no answer. After an hour of vain searching we returned home.

We spent the night. I slept very little in my comfy old bed, the shotgun leaning against the nightstand. Doze off. Awaken imagining footsteps outside through walls too thick to allow anything but the loudest jackboot stomping to penetrate. The front door knob turning, squeaking ever so low. On my feet and out of the room.

Door closed.

Just my head.

I glanced over at Peter curled up on the couch, a light coverlet draped over his body. I padded to the window, pulled the curtains aside to scan the street. Nothing. I sighed and then joined him under the blanket, burying my face against his chin, the stubble scratching my cheek.

I fell asleep for the tenth time that night.

 

Morning came almost cheerily. The sun had risen long ago, and now burst through the crack between the window coverings, brightening the entire living room with a soft, warm glow. I blinked several times, and then turned my head. How beautiful Peter looked I thought looking at him. He lay beside me all scrunched up with is back against the cushions, still asleep, breathing in little metronomic rhythms. I gently unwrapped myself from him, rose, and padded to the bathroom, grabbing my backpack jammed with toiletries on the way. No running water here, yet the mirror over the sink, all dusty, but working its inanimate self, threw an image of my face and mussed hair faithfully back at me. Frightful! I grabbed the brush I’d used a thousand times from the tiled surface and began the job of straightening my hair. Looked at my teeth, instinctively grabbed toothpaste and a toothbrush from the pack and cleaned them without rinsing.

Had Daddy returned home last night between my fits of sleeping and being jolted back to wakefulness, I would have heard the door open. I sighed on the edge of defeat. Discouragement. Peter would demand, in his kindly way, that we leave and continue north. My equally kindly response would be no.

Wherever Daddy was, I intended to find him. Had I been him, where would I have gone after burying my wife? Somewhere close, maybe, but away from the home that carried the ghosts of his loved ones.

As I worked the brush over and over through the tangle of my hair, thinking of all this, Peter emerged in the doorway all sleepy-eyed and stretching. He smiled at me, and then took the brush and quietly smoothed out the hair on the back of my neck.

“You could go to Hollywood you know.”

Probably not the best choice of words that morning, but I peered at the cloudy image of him in the mirror and smiled anyway.

“We’ll get there eventually,” I said. I whipped around to face him. “Peter, we have to find him first. You know that. He’s around here somewhere. Please, we just have to figure out where, and then go to him.”

He sighed with exasperation and brought his fingers to my cheek. “Somewhere could cover a pretty vast area…”

“We only looked on a couple of blocks. He could be on one of the very next ones.”

“Or miles and miles away.”

“Then we’ll search every