The End of the World (34 page)

Cameron

She’s been quiet
the entire drive, looking at her hands like they hold the secrets of the future. Like if she stares hard enough, answers will appear in the form of words in the lines on her skin and rise up to tell her a story. But I’m lost. I’m as lost as she is. The only difference is I’m hoping this place will help us both stop searching. That maybe…just maybe…we’ll manage to find a little peace.

I’m aware it could backfire. All I know right now is I have to try.

“Thank you for coming with me.” I look over at her, but she doesn’t move. I can’t tell if she’s angry or confused or just in a quiet mood, but I’m not left wondering for long.

“Why did you come to my house? A few days ago you told me there was no chance…” The hope behind her question is thin; my answer will either strengthen it or obliterate it forever.

“A few days ago I thought you were married.”

“True, but—”

“A few days ago I didn’t know you had a kid.”

“What does that have to do with—?”

“A few days ago I was stupid.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see her lip twitch before it falls completely. She likes my answers, but they scare her. So in a classic move I knew would come eventually, she changes the subject.

“Where are we going?”

I can’t answer her because I know she’ll argue. Probably try to bolt, and I wouldn’t put it past Shaye to jump out of my moving car. Thankfully we’re almost there, so keeping my mouth closed isn’t as impossible as it might have been. A few seconds later she shifts in her seat, and I feel the heaviness of her gaze on me and begin to second-guess the wisdom of my decision. Maybe I should have asked. Maybe I should have issued a warning. Maybe I should have given her time to prepare.

But it’s too late now.

What’s done is done.

With a sigh that only I can hear, I slowly pull into the space and park the car, then climb out onto the grass, listening as leaves and twigs and gravel crunch under the weight of my footsteps. The day is bright. Almost cheerful. Deceivingly perfect.

Or it might be.

If not for the way Shaye stares back at me through the windshield. She’s afraid.

Of this.

Of life.

Of truth.

But most of all…

I can tell she’s afraid of me.

*

The numbers on
the tombstone add up to fifteen.

Fifteen short years.

A life that ended before it had a chance to begin.

I trace the dash between the numbers, silently counting everything it represents.

My life, from age fourteen to eighteen.

My hope for family, come to life with the crack of a front door.

My time, spent with Shaye at the end of a dock, eating cake and solving the world’s recycling problems.

The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.

To this day, the best friend I’ve ever had.

I hear her swallow the rest of her tears; in the fifteen minutes we’ve been here, she’s cried enough for both of us. Slowly her hand falls from the side of Pete’s tombstone, and she turns to face me. I know she has questions. I know there are lots to ask that may or may not go unanswered forever. But I know there’s only one on her mind right now in the same way I’m certain it’s coming in the second before she asks it.

“What happened after I left? I wanted to ask years ago, from the moment I saw you in the laundry room.” She runs two fingertips under her eyes. “Back then I was afraid. I’m so tired of being afraid, Cameron. Can you tell me what happened?”

She’s watching me like she doesn’t know if asking was a good idea, like this bit of information might hold the missing nail that finally seals her own coffin forever. But what she doesn’t know is that she’s right. She’s finished being afraid. She’s finished getting hurt. We’re done with darkness. After today, after I tell this story that I’ve never spoken out loud, we’re through with pain. At least the kind that each of us—whether by choice or circumstance or simple geography—keep forcing ourselves to face without each other.

I’m finished trying to live life alone.

“For so long I tried to forget…” I pause, clear my throat. It seems you can’t fully suppress history, no matter how many years you spend trying to force a mind into submission. “Carl snapped. Went ballistic. Accused me of knowing where you had gone. Wouldn’t believe me when I told him I had no idea.”

I still remember the screams.

Carl’s.

Mine.

Pete’s.

Maria’s.

Alan’s.

Even Tami’s.

I swallow, hating the memories but forcing them to the surface. I’m determined. After today, it’s finished. “He knocked me around, broke my wrist, locked the pantry again and refused to give us any food. That time for a week.” I look down at the blades of grass surrounding us. “But I managed. Swiped some food from the school cafeteria, and it helped to know that the kids at least ate at day care.” I look at her. “It passed. He went back to being less abusive, but he was always angry. I did my best to avoid him. Took care of the little kids. Tried to make the best life I could for them over the next three years.”

“Without me there to help,” she whispers.

I look at her. “We both know you wouldn’t have been able to stay much longer anyway.” Her eighteenth birthday came only a few weeks after she disappeared.

It’s been six years since I moved out, but the memories are as fresh as if I’m still running, running, trying to find a place to hide.

I keep going, keep unloading all my mental baggage on Shaye and spare no detail.

Surprisingly, it feels good to let go of what, until now, has been nearly a decade of impacted mental baggage that has messed with my mind in ways even I haven’t understood.

Until now.

Until the weight is lifted and the only thing I’m left with are the memories.

And maybe still a little bit of the guilt.

“I don’t know how we survived that place,” Shaye whispers when I’m done.

And she’s right. Call it luck or chance or just plain right timing, but I don’t know how any one of us made it out with our souls still intact, never mind our bodies.

But we did. We’re still here. And now it’s up to us to make the best of it.

I reach for her. Envelop her in a hug that I hope rids us both of every negative pent up emotion once and for all. When she sighs, sniffs into my neck, and places a kiss on my collar bone, I think it might have worked. I kiss her cheek and let go.

“Do you have plans tomorrow?” I ask.

The words come out of nowhere, completely lighthearted and out of place considering where we are, what we’re doing, what we’re talking about. Then again, life is short.

I look at Pete’s tombstone, at the rudimentary etching that mark his birth and death. The passage of time has already taken its toll.

Time moves fast. I’m just now realizing I need to move faster before it pulls away from me completely.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Shaye says. “I’m free all day.”

I smile at her. I don’t look away.

Good answer.

Cameron

I
t seems I’m
full of questionable ideas lately. This is just another one.

But the one thing I keep thinking…the one thing I’m convinced of…if we have any chance of moving into a future, we both have to let go of the past.

Let go of its firm grip, once and for all.

The house is abandoned.

A red and white For Sale sign sits in the front yard, but in light of recent discoveries that still have this place leading almost every local five o’clock news story, I doubt it will garner much interest. At least not among folks who live nearby. Overlooking violence, sexual abuse, and dead bodies can be a tough sell in today’s market. Imagine that.

Shaye said she would meet me here.

When I first asked her, she grew quiet. Cautious. Very, very wary. Still, she said she would meet me.

I’ve been waiting half an hour.

Ten minutes ago, I began to doubt the reality of her actually showing up, but like the sucker I am, I haven’t gone anywhere. Hope, for me, is a constant. Sometimes it’s just lacking in substance.

I scoot back a couple of inches and withdraw the paper from my pocket, then skim the faded words I scribbled in pencil when I was twenty and pretended it was an assignment for school instead of everything I ever wanted to say to my soulmate. The letters are faded, smeared by my own fingerprints over the passage of time. I intended to finish the poem and give it to her back then, but I only managed to knock out five lines before she rocked my world with the news of her pregnancy. She disappeared before I made it to line six.

Reaching for my leather binder, I pull out a pen and a fresh piece of paper.

I’m giving this to her today. I just wish I’d thought to start sooner rather than later. Instead, I’ve spent the last thirty minutes skipping rocks and staring at a family of ducks swimming in front of me, a corroded Diet Coke can bobbing up and down in the middle of them. Normally I would stand to retrieve it; today, things like pollution and preservation just don’t interest me much. The ducks can play fetch with that can for the rest of their lives for as much as I care at the moment.

I look over my shoulder.

Still no sign of Shaye.

With a sigh, I start writing.

Five minutes later, my pen runs out of ink on the word
corner.
Three lines in, and all I have to show for my effort is a newly crumpled piece of paper, a tiny hole I made in my attempt to get the ink flowing again, and a smear mark that resembles a small black river rock—not exactly a coincidence considering all the rocks still stacked in a tiny pyramid shape right next to me. But now the word
corner
looks like
comer
and makes no sense whatsoever—but I’m stuck with it because for some stupid reason this is the only paper I thought to bring in my folder.

And I call myself a writer.

Giving up for the moment, I look up from my wrinkled paper to study the view.

The midnight sky is blacker than I remember in recent memory, the only light coming from both the thin sliver of moon hanging high above my head and the hot glow from my cell phone’s flashlight app casting a blinding beam onto my lap. The contrast is fitting, matching my erratic mood.

Where is Shaye?

For the first time all night, I’m wracked with the fear that maybe…just maybe…she’s changed her mind and no longer wants to see me.

Drawing in a deep breath, I check the time on my phone yet again. Forty-five minutes have passed. It’s been too long. There’s no denying she isn’t coming. The depression that thought brings rolls over itself until I feel almost crazy from sadness. To temper the bad mood, I reach for a new pen and start to write again. My relationship with Shaye might be in question, but the outcome of this poem won’t be. If nothing else, I’ll nail it to the wood underneath me as a current nod to the past. Maybe she’ll show eventually. Maybe she’ll find it one day. Maybe she’ll read it and know once and for all how I really feel. Maybe she’ll realize that despite popular opinion, you can go back. You can reach into the past and figure out a way to change it. You can come to an old dock full of haunting memories and somehow manage to remember the good ones.

And really, that’s my hope for Shaye. That someday her painful memories will be replaced with pleasant ones.

A few minutes later, I’m finally finished. Everything I’ve wanted to say for years, condensed into nineteen lines. It isn’t perfect, but in the years I’ve spent writing professionally, it’s the most important thing I’ve ever penned.

Just as I move to stand, the creak of a wooden plank startles me. All plans for looking cool and collected flee in an instant, and my heart pounds like I’ve spent every second of the last twenty-four years sprinting toward a finish line and only just now made it across.

Shaye. She’s standing in front of me.

As usual, her chestnut hair with its stubborn strand falls across her forehead. Her long arms wrap around her midsection like a shield, protecting her from a hard hit to the side or the memories of this place currently coming at her so powerfully I can almost see them knocking against her mind, her heart, her body. Despite the fear in her eyes, she walks closer and gives me a small smile.

“The babysitter was late. Have you been waiting here long?”

“Not too long,” I lie. “I’ve been working, so I barely noticed how late it is.” The lies explode off my tongue like pop-rocks, but they can’t be helped.

My night is made.

Maybe my entire life.

Slowly, she lowers herself beside me and takes a deep breath. “I can’t believe we’re back here.”

Her gaze is fixed on the water, and right then the years melt away. The scene is so familiar I begin to ache. The last time we were
here
, she slept on my lap until sunrise. A couple hours later she was out of my life for the next four years. It took forever to find her, and in no time I lost her again. In my lifetime, I’ve been without Shaye longer than I’ve been with her. Those statistics don’t add up to a number I like. I’m changing that today.