Before She Was Mine

by Amelia Wilde

  Where she touches, the pain recedes, enough that my mind clears along the edges.

  “I’m going to bring my hand down to your toes. One, two, three, four, five. And then to the bottom of your foot. Here’s the ball of your foot. Here’s the heel.”

  I resurface.

  The pain swirls away, down to the dull ache that’s my constant companion, and I push myself upright in the bed. Summer sits up straight, looking at me, her body still.

  “Holy Christ.”

  She moves toward me, but her belly stops her. “Day?”

  “Hey.”

  “Oh, my God.” She crawls over my legs and curls up on my lap, letting out a quick breath. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  I can still feel the remains of the nightmare as it flees. “I scared the shit out of myself.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Are you okay?”

  I take stock. I’m tired. It’s the middle of the night. But nothing is extreme anymore. Sleep beckons at the boundaries of my mind. I lay back against the pillow, taking her with me. “You should be a counselor.”

  Summer shifts, curling into me. “You should see a real one.”

  I don’t deserve a real counselor.

  But—

  “I’ll do it,” I tell her, as I fall back into what I hope is a dreamless sleep. “For you.”

  33

  Summer

  I wake up on the night-edge of dawn, my back against the hard line of Dayton’s body.

  Worry flashes in the corner of my mind, but then he breathes in and I know he’s awake. Good. That means he’s not having another nightmare. The air in the bedroom is tinged with a hint of gray light. I have the sense that time is moving slowly now. We can talk.

  “Will you tell me what happened?”

  He rolls over, his chest against my back, and puts a hand on my hip.

  “When?”

  “Between you and that guy.”

  Dayton runs his hand down to the angle of my knee and back up. “His name is Alexei Sokolov. Everybody calls him Alex.”

  I turn the name over in my mind. “Russian?”

  “His parents were from Russia. They moved here when he was a kid. A little kid—I don’t know exactly when.”

  Under any other circumstances, the warmth of Dayton’s hand would either lull me to sleep or turn me on. This time, I hover in the feeling, in the sound of his voice.

  “Why’s he coming after you like this?” I don’t say after us.

  Dayton breathes in, his chest pressing against my back. In and out. In and out. “I was in rough shape when I got back from Afghanistan. I didn’t come straight home after the incident in the Humvee.”

  “You didn’t?” My entire body hums with anticipation. I’ve never heard these details before. Not from Wes. Not from anybody.

  “No.” Dayton’s hand stops moving. We’re approaching territory he doesn’t want to talk about. “At first I was at a military hospital in Germany. Then I came back to Drum to wait out the end of my contract. By the time I got to the city, things were pretty dire.”

  “In terms of money?”

  “In terms of pain.” The word is loaded, heavy with the memory of his body thrashing beneath the sheets just a few hours ago. “My foot was gone, but it hurt all the time. The temporary prosthetic has always hurt.”

  “Why didn’t you—”

  “Because I didn’t think I deserved a better one. It was my fault we ran over an IED in the first place.”

  “Dayton—”

  “Do you want to know about Alexei or not?”

  “Yes. God. He’s trying to kill us.” I hold the fear at bay by speaking the words in a light tone. This guy—he’s come after me more than once.

  Dayton pauses.

  “When I got to the city, I crashed with a bunch of different people. A lot of them were ex-Army. Friends of friends, that kind of thing. For a while, I lived off savings and tried to dull the pain by getting drunk. Then money got tight and alcohol got expensive.”

  “Wait.” I try to roll toward him, but it’s too much effort, so I settle for putting my hand on his. “What about disability pay? The VA—”

  Dayton laughs softly. “I didn’t apply for any of that.”

  No. Of course he didn’t.

  “I met Alexei at a party. Curtis—the guy I was living with before this—had mutual friends in common. And Alexei had an offer.”

  My gut goes cold. “Day.” I swallow before I can speak. “Did you kill someone?” Oh, God. If he killed someone, even out of desperation, how can I forgive him for that? Will I be able to forgive him for that?

  “It wasn’t like that,” he says quickly, and then his body tenses against mine. “I didn’t mean to.”

  My heart stops.

  “What happened?”

  “I was driving the car.” Dayton takes his hand away and rolls away from me. “I was only driving the car.”

  34

  Dayton

  Eighteen Months Ago

  “I’ve got something that can take the edge off.”

  I look up through a haze of smoke and bullshit.

  The guy has a crooked smile and he’s too thin. His baseball cap is angled sideways. He looks like an idiot.

  “Fuck off.”

  He doesn’t fuck off. He sits down next to me on the couch. The cushion under his ass is worn through to the foam padding. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” He jerks his jaw in the direction of my leg.

  I don’t want to talk about how much it hurts. I don’t want to talk about the dull throb that settles into a stinging ache if I walk from the couch to the fucking bathroom. I don’t want to talk about how there is no fucking foot but the toes feel cramped, curled under. I can’t get them to release. And the throbbing guilt in the center of my chest. It’s like a stab wound. If I had been paying attention…

  “I can see it hurts,” he says. “I promise. I can take the edge off.”

  “You can go away.”

  “Alex.” Another guy cuts in from the side of the couch. “Delivery by three.”

  “I’ve got it,” says the asshole who won’t leave me alone. I guess his name is Alex. He turns his attention back to me. “Look. You give me a ride, I’ll give you something that’ll make it easier to handle.” He’s got an accent. It’s faint, but it comes out in the consonants. “It’ll be like the pain is on a separate island.”

  I look across the couch at him. Pale blue eyes. Light hair. I don’t trust him.

  The pain moves another inch up my leg. It’s taking on more ground.

  I am already ruined.

  “One ride?”

  He grins. “Maybe two. It’s worth it, right?”

  It’s more than two rides.

  After the first one, Alex presses two little pills into my hand and congratulates me. “You’re about to be a new man.”

  He’s right.

  It doesn’t erase the pain in my leg. It pushes it to a separate island, just like he said, across a river from my real life. For the first time since that day in the Humvee, I can think.

  I think myself right into a neat little box, where what I’m doing for Alex is fine. I never ask him what he’s doing at the houses we visit in the boroughs. I never look at the people he meets. I pick him up at his place and I drop him back off. That’s it.

  Sometimes, his wife comes along with us. She wears a thin silver band around her left ring finger and hardly speaks. Her name is Kate.

  Alex pays me in pills, and in my newly clear-headed state, I figure out that I’m not going to be able to live on pills forever. So I take a job at Killon, manufacturing windows, and give him rides at night.

  This has two effects. The first is that I’m fucking tired. The second is that the little pills don’t work as well as they used to. I bargain with him. I need three. Then four.

  On the sixteenth ride, I turn off the car when he gets in. Kate climbs into the backseat, the passenger side, and says nothing.

  “
What are you doing?” He shrugs his jacket up to his neck. “It’s freezing out. Turn on the car.”

  “Pills first.”

  He shakes his head. “You know that’s not how it goes.”

  “That’s how it goes today.” I’m banking on the fact that he doesn’t have time before his delivery to get another ride. I’m banking on it because the pain has crawled all the way up into the back of my neck, an electric line from my foot to my head, and I can’t think straight. I need the pills. It can’t wait.

  Alex sighs. “Two now, two after.”

  “All of them, right now.”

  He must hear the desperation in my voice because he reaches into his pocket for a folded napkin and drops them into my hand. One, two, three, four. I knock them back with the remains of a coffee I bought on the way out here. It’s already cold.

  I turn the car on.

  “Where are we headed?”

  He names a place on the Upper East Side and I sigh. It’s almost two in the morning. This is going to take fucking forever.

  We’ve only gone about fifteen blocks—still on the Queens side of the bridge—when a familiar patter-patter starts hitting on the top of the car.

  Sleet.

  Alex cranes his neck and looks out the window. “Shit.”

  “It’s not good.”

  It’s icy, coating the road and the windshield. At the next intersection, I tap on the brakes and the front wheels jerk sideways. I correct it, but it still takes longer than I expected to stop.

  Alex has his hand on the door handle. “Fuck, man.”

  “It’s fine.”

  This is his moment to call it off. I’m sure as hell not going to. I got what I came for, so I’m in no position to back out now. And even though I make it a point to know as little as possible about Alex, I’ve overheard some things. Namely that his full name is Alexei Sokolov, and he’s got some shady fucking ties to a Russian underground group.

  I push that fact out of my mind. I don’t know anything.

  We move through the intersection and the sleet intensifies. The pain in my leg is receding, moving out to low tide, and my head clears. The more it clears, the more I know one thing: we shouldn’t be driving right now. It’s the end of February, when the weather is volatile in New York City, and this kind of shit is no joke.

  It’s a long way from here to the Upper East Side.

  A long fucking way.

  I grip the wheel tighter and flick my eyes up to the rearview mirror. Kate sits in the back, staring out the window. What little light there is from the streetlights reflects off her face. She sits with her hands in her lap. Why does she go along with Alexei? On all the rides I’ve given him, she’s gone on at least half, and she never gets out of the car.

  The sleet pummels the road, the roof of the car, everything, and the wipers can’t keep up. I stop at the next intersection and squint toward the stoplight. It looks red.

  Kate says something from the backseat. I’m not paying attention, so I don’t catch the words. I do catch that there’s a note of alarm in her soft voice.

  “It’s going to be quick,” Alexei says. “Then we’ll go home.”

  I will the sleet to clear so I can see the fucking stoplight.

  Is that a flicker of green?

  Shit.

  I wait.

  It cycles through the colors again.

  There—that must be yellow, and then red. It must be.

  The sleet only gets heavier as we wait for green.

  Alexei gets impatient, tapping his fingers on the dash.

  I’m not totally sure it’s changed when he brings his palms together, a sharp clap. “Let’s go. Green light. Get out of here.”

  “I’m going.”

  I step on the gas and the car lurches forward into the intersection. It’s a good thing it’s so late. Minimal traffic.

  Which is why it surprises me when the headlights blaze on the passenger side of the car.

  “Fuck,” Alexei yells. “Fuck.”

  I gun it, but the wheels scramble for purchase on the road. Military focus kicks in. I don’t turn the wheel—that won’t do us any good. We have to get out of here. We have to go forward. I stomp on the accelerator again but the wheels spin.

  He doesn’t see us.

  He doesn’t see us.

  The lights bear down, one, two… I give one more desperate step on the accelerator. The car careens forward. Kate screams.

  It’s not enough.

  The truck—it’s huge, it has to be a truck—slams into the back half of the car and we start spinning, a violent torque that slams my head against the driver’s side window. I hear ragged breathing, the scraping of ruined metal, and then we collide with something. A building? A mailbox? The breathing cuts out in a gurgle that I’d recognize anywhere.

  Alex sucks in a breath in the passenger seat and I pick up my head. Headache. Fuck. Something hot is on my cheek. I put my fingers to my cheekbone and they come away wet and red.

  He’s shouting something, but the sound rattles uselessly around in my brain. Alex shoves his full weight against the passenger door and it springs open. The sound of sleet gets louder. I watch him go to the back door, but the back door no longer exists in a way we’d think of as a door. It’s crumpled into a mess.

  So is Kate.

  He dives back into the front and kicks me in the face on his way over the shitty center console. Sleet from his boots is everywhere.

  In the backseat, he sits beside her, his chest heaving. He touches her face. He fumbles for her seatbelt and somehow gets it undone. Then, ever so gently, he puts his arm around her shoulder. When he pulls her body to him, her head lolls to the side like a broken doll.

  She’s gone.

  “Kate,” he breathes, and I look away. The sound of his voice is too intimate.

  “Kate, it’s all right.” He takes a deep breath. “Kate?”

  I open the door and half-slip, half-stumble out of the car.

  I’m halfway down the block, dialing 9-1-1, when I hear Alexei start to howl.

  35

  Summer

  Day doesn’t say much the morning after he tells me about the car accident.

  He brings me coffee, half-caf with all the cream and sugar he can fit in the cup, and then he goes back to the kitchen. He reappears with a plate of scrambled and toast as I’m getting out of the shower.

  It’s a process, with a big belly like this. I’m constantly off-balance. I feel even more off-balance today, after all the events of last night. Highs and lows. I still have an emotional hangover from hearing Dayton talk about that accident.

  And it was an accident. I believe that with every inch of my being.

  He doesn’t.

  I eat breakfast in bed, wearing just my panties, while he gets dressed for work.

  I watch his reflection in the mirror by the dresser while he buttons his shirt. “You have an appointment today, don’t you?”

  His eyes flick down to the floor and back up. “Yeah.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  A darker expression moves over his face like a shadow. I brace myself for him to say no, I don’t want you to go anywhere. I want you to stay inside this house with the doors locked and call the police if anyone so much as knocks.

  “You have work.” He meets my eyes in the mirror. “You’re right. They need you there. I know you’ll be safe.”

  I put down the piece of toast I’ve been eating and shimmy to the side of the bed. Day is there as soon as I move, holding his hand out for support. I hug him the moment I’m on my feet. He seems tentative somehow.

  I squeeze him tighter.

  “What’s this for?” I hear the smile in his voice, even with my cheek pressed to his chest.

  “It’s so you know.”

  “So I know what?”

  “That everything’s going to be all right.”

  He sighs, but the tension is still there, holding his core hostage. “I love you, Sunny.”
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br />   How many times has he said this to me? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. It still fills me with a sparkling excitement, like it’s the very first time.

  I only wish there was nothing to mar it. No black cloud. No image creeping in the back of my mind of Dayton’s hands on the wheel. Was he high from whatever was in those pills? He shouldn’t have been driving that car, not while taking painkillers.

  He calls for a car to take me into work. I should be taking the subway, but the stairs make my ankles hurt, so I am delivered to the front door of my office in the city’s finest Uber each morning.

  On the way, I watch the traffic and think about that man’s wife.

  Alexei was definitely doing something shady. Delivering drugs? Probably. But love doesn’t care if someone’s doing something shady. Or, in Dayton’s case, allegedly doing something shady. I should know. And I’m the last person who wants to encourage being on the wrong side of the law.

  All that has no bearing on Kate, the silent woman in the backseat. Why was she with Alex? Why did she ride along that day?

  There’s a simple answer to that.

  She was in love with him.

  I wish Dayton was in the car with me right now.

  Baby kicks and rolls, and I breathe out, giving her more room.

  That’s when it hits me, like one of her big kicks.

  Kate was somebody’s baby, too.

  This little girl isn’t even born yet, but already I can feel the hole she’d leave in the universe if she was gone.

  Kate was that person for someone. For how many people? Was Alex the only one orbiting her so closely? Where were her parents? How did they find out about the accident? The closest I’ve ever come to that feeling are those moments when I thought Wes might have died in Afghanistan.

  I cannot cry in this Uber.

  “You okay?” The driver’s eyes regard me with concern in the rearview mirror. I’m sure he’s terrified that I’ll go into labor in his personal vehicle.

  I give him a broad smile. “Lost in thought.”

  “Something sad?”